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SIR  EDWARD  CARSON 
AND  THE  ULSTER  MOVEMENT 


BY  THE  SAME  AUTHOR 

NOVELS 

MRS.  MARTIN'S  MAN 
ALICE  AND  A  FAMILY 

SHORT  STORIES 

EIGHT  O'CLOCK  AND  OTHER  STUDIES 

PLAYS 

JANE  CLEGG 

FOUR  IRISH  PLAYS 
MIXED  MARRIAGE 
THE  MAGNANIMOUS  LOVER 
THE  CRITICS 
THE  ORANGEMAN 

JOHN  FERGUSON 


SIR  EDWARD  CARSON 

AND 

THE    ULSTER    MOVEMENT 


BY 


ST.  JOHN  G.  ERVINE 


NEW  YORK 
DODD,    MEAD   AND   COMPANY 

1916 


vr 
c  - 


r: 


-3 


V 

2 


3? 


TO 
M  (GEORGE  W.  RUSSELL) 


?  360838 


FOREWORD 

One  day,  soon  after  I  had  accepted  the 
commission  to  write  this  book,  I  met  a 
friend  who  is  the  assistant  editor  of  an  im- 
portant Conservative  weekly  review  and, 
although  he  is  a  journalist,  a  distinguished 
man  of  letters.  I  told  him  that  I  was  about 
to  write  a  book  on  Sir  Edward  Carson,  and 
he  gaped  at  me  for  a  few  moments  in 
astonishment.  Then  he  said  "Good  God  !  " 
and  walked  away.  I  met  him  again,  shortly 
afterwards,  and  he  asked  me  if  I  had  been 
serious  when  I  said  that  I  had  agreed  to 
write  this  book.  I  assured  him  that  I  had 
been  quite  serious,  and  he  replied,  "  I  would 
rather  write  a  book  on  tombstones  than  a 
book  on  Carson  !  " 

I  found  similar  astonishment  and  con- 
tempt in  every  person  to  whom  I  spoke  of 
my  intention.  At  first,  my  friends.  Con- 
servatives, Liberals,  Socialists  and  persons 
to  whom  politicians  are  utterly  damnable, 
were  incredulous.  "  What,"  they  demanded, 
"  has  this  Carson  done  that  a  book  should 
be  written  about  him  ?  How  do  you  pro- 
pose to  fill  a  volume  on  him  ?  .  .  ." 

They  led  me  to  a  Reference  Library  and 


SIB   EDWARD    CARSON 


compelled  me  to  read  Sir  Edward's  record 
in  "  Who's  Who." 

"  Look  at  it !  "  they  said,  pointing  to  the 
meagre  statement  of  the  man's  meagre  life 
and  achievements,  and  I  looked  at  it.  "  It 
isn't  much  of  a  life,  is  it  ?  "  they  added. 

"  He  has  been  a  successful  lawyer,"  I 
replied,  looking  for  the  silver  lining  which  is 
said  to  be  in  every  cloud. 

"  You  might  as  well  write  a  book  about 
a  successful  haberdasher  !  "  they  answered. 

"  And  then  there  is  Ulster,"  I  pleaded. 

"  Ulster  be  damned  !  "  they  said. 

I  closed  "  Who's  Who,"  and  returned  it 
to  the  shelf  whereon  such  books  lie.  "  Oh, 
no,"  I  retorted  as  I  did  so,  "  Ulster  won't 
be  damned.  Ulster  is  of  very  great  im- 
portance to  Ireland." 

This  book,  then,  bears  the  title  of  "  Sir 
Edward  Carson,"  but  the  title  is  largely  a 
misnomer,  for  the  book  will  be  about  Ulster 
and  the  Ulster  people  and  their  relation  to 
the  rest  of  the  Irish  people ;  and  so  I  offer 
no  apology  to  the  reader  for  writing  it, 
though  its  title  would  seem  to  demand  one. 


St.  J.  G.  E* 


8 


SIR  tDWARD  CARSON  AND 
THE  ULSTER  MOVEMENT 

CHAPTER    I 


All  generalisations  are  false,  even  this  one 
which  I  have  just  made,  but  none  are  so 
false  as  those  which  deal  with  races.  They 
may,  indeed,  be  said  to  be  schoolmasters' 
dodges  to  avoid  the  fatigue  of  thought,  the 
refuge  in  which  the  lazy  man  immiu*es  his 
brains  so  that  he  may  not  have  to  undergo 
the  labour  of  discovering  the  truth.  The 
tendency  to  generalise  is  a  universal  one, 
although  the  English  people,  with  that 
curious  modesty  which  sometimes  afflicts  an 
arrogant  race,  often  imagine  that  it  is  only 
shown  by  themselves.  Ibsen's  plays  are 
full  of  people  who  are,  in  every  respect  save 
that  of  physical  geography,  as  insular  in 
their  ideas  as  the  English  are  reputed  to  be. 
Dostoevsky,  great  artist  though  he  was,  had 
as  much  of  the  narrowness  of  vision  as  is 
possessed  by  the  least  intelligent  member  of 
the  Primrose  League  :    just  as  there  is  no 

9 


SIR   EDWARD    CARSON 


place  like  England  to  the  Primrose  Leaguer, 
so  there  was  no  place  like  Russia  to  Dosto- 
evsky,  and  as  his  Letters  show  he  was  singu- 
larly unhappy  in  any  country  but  his  own. 

These  generalisations  about  races  and 
nations  might  not  be  of  much  consequence 
if  they  ended  in  their  own  fatuity  ;  but  they 
become  a  grave  peril  to  the  comity  of  the 
world  when  they  act  as  barriers  between 
race  and  race,  making  suspicion,  distrust, 
contempt,  hatred  and  all  uncharitableness. 
How  much  of  the  responsibility  for  the 
European  Disaster  of  1914  is  due  to  the 
lazy  man's  generalisations  about  his  neigh- 
bours in  Europe  cannot  be  calculated  ;  but 
undoubtedly  some  of  it,  perhaps  a  great 
deal  of  it,  springs  from  that  calamitous 
inertia.  The  Englishman  who  went  about 
declaring  that  one  of  his  countrymen,  with 
one  hand  tied  behind  his  back,  could  utterly 
destroy  three  foreigners,  each  with  both 
hands  free,  may  not  have  believed  that 
statement  to  be  literally  true,  but  he 
certainly  believed  that  it  was  approxi- 
mately true.  The  falseness  of  the  belief 
was  revealed  in  the  humiliations  of  the 
Boer  War.  The  German  who  went  about 
asserting  that  his  Kultur  was  superior  to 
every  form  of  civilisation  the  world  has 
known,  may  not,  when  brought  to  argu- 
ment, have  been  prepared  to  assert  that 
that  claim  was  well  founded  in  every  respect, 

10 


AND    THE    ULSTER   MOVEMENT 

but  he  certainly  believed  that  it  contained 
a  great  deal  of  truth,  more  truth,  perhaps, 
that  any  similar  claim  for  any  other  culture. 
The  falseness  of  that  belief  is,  at  the  moment 
of  writing,  in  process  of  exposure. 

]Pew  countries  have  suffered  so  terribly 
from  loose  generalisations  as  Ireland  has, 
and  few  peoples  have  been  so  tragically  mis- 
understood and  misrepresented  as  the  Irish 
people  have  been  misunderstood  and  mis- 
represented by  the  English  people.  English- 
men, indeed,  take  a  miserable  pride  in 
asserting  that  they  do  not  understand 
Irishmen.  Their  inability  to  understand 
my  countrymen  has  not  prevented  them 
from  attempting  to  govern  them ;  for  the 
boys  of  the  bulldog  breed,  if  they  cannot 
solve  a  problem,  can  always  sit  on  it.  There 
is,  however,  no  real  inability  on  the  part  of 
the  Englishman  to  understand  the  Irish- 
man :  there  is  only  that  laziness  in  knowing 
to  which  I  have  already  made  reference. 
When  a  man  has  learned  to  imderstand 
himself  he  has  learned  to  understand  all 
men.  That,  however,  is  an  understanding 
at  which  most  men  refuse  to  arrive,  and  so 
it  happens  that  the  world  is  governed  on  the 
plan  of  tragical  ignorance  and  calamitous 
generalisations.  There  are  two  facts  about 
men  which  probably  contain  all  the  truth 
about  them  :  one  is  that  all  men  are  alike  ; 
the  other  is  that  all  men  are  different.    It  is 

11 


SIR   EDWARD    CARSON 


the  confusion  of  these  two  facts  which 
creates  discord ;  for  men,  ignorant  of  or 
indifferent  to  truth,  insist  on  seeing  re- 
semblances where  there  are  differences,  and 
differences  where  there  are  close  affinities. 


All  men  are  alike,  fashioned  according  to 
type,  "  made,"  as  the  Bible  has  it,  "  in  the 
image  of  God."  They  resemble  each  other 
in  Rmdamentals ;  they  differ  from  each 
other  in  inessentials.  The  inessentials  are  of 
great  importance,  since  they  give  colour 
and  variety  to  human  existence,  but  they 
are  no  more  Life  than  the  gargoyles  on 
Notre  Dame  are  the  cathedral.  If  the 
English  reader  of  this  book  is  to  understand 
the  Irish  people,  he  must  know  that  every 
Irishman  is  different  from  all  other  men  in 
his  decorative  aspect,  but  closely  akin  to  all 
other  men  in  his  essential  aspect :  that  is  to 
say,  he  is  very  much  like  Englishmen, 
Frenchmen  and  Hottentots.  Perhaps  the 
most  stupid  of  all  the  nonsense  that  was 
said  and  written  during  the  last  Home  Rule 
controversy  arose  out  of  the  talk  about 
"  the  two  nations  in  Ireland  "  :  Catholic 
and  Protestant.  Talk  of  this  kind  is  the  sort 
of  twaddle  that  is  uttered  by  politicians  and 
journalists    and    persons    who   have    never 

12 


AND    THE    ULSTER    MOVEMENT 

seriously  thought  about  anything  in  their 
lives  for  ten  consecutive  minutes.  There  are 
decorative  differences  between  Ulstermen  (a 
considerable  number  of  whom  are  Catholics) 
and  the  rest  of  the  inhabitants  of  Ireland, 
just  as  there  are  decorative  differences 
between  Lancashiremen  and  men  of  Kent ; 
but  these  differences  are  immaterial  and  no 
greater  than  the  differences  between  Munster- 
men  and  Leinstermen.  The  reader  may  urge 
that  the  religious  difference  is  a  material 
difference.  He  may  say  that  there  is  a 
greater  difference  between  the  Belfastman 
and  the  Corkman  than  there  is  between  the 
Manchesterman  and  the  Tunbridge  Wells- 
man,  for  the  EngUshmen  are  Protestants, 
whereas  one  of  the  Irishmen  is  a  Catholic 
and  one  is  a  Protestant. 

That  argument  is,  I  think,  fallacious. 
There  appears  to  me,  who  am  a  member  of 
an  Ulster  Protestant  family,  as  great  a 
difference  between  a  Manchester  Dissenter 
and  a  Timbridge  Wells  Anglican  as  there  is 
between  a  Belfast  Protestant  and  a  Cork 
Catholic.  There  is  certainly  as  much  bitter 
feeling;  in  some  instances,  there  is  more.  I 
believe  that  there  is  more  amenity  in  a 
small  Irish  town  or  village  between  Catholics 
and  Protestants  than  there  is  between 
members  of  the  Church  of  England  and 
Nonconformists  in  a  town  or  village  of 
similar  size  in  England.     I  doubt  whether 

13 


SIB   EDWARD    CARSON 


Catholics  and  Protestants  in  Ireland,  gener- 
ally speaking,  feel  as  antagonistic  towards 
each  other  as  Low  Churchmen  feel  towards 
High  Churchmen,  or  vice  versa,  in  England. 
The  Kikuyu  controversy  raged,  not  among 
Irishmen,  but  among  Englishmen.  The 
Bishop  of  Zanzibar  who  "  excommunicated  " 
the  Bishop  of  Hereford  for  heretical  conduct 
is  not  an  Irish  Catholic  venting  his  indigna- 
tion on  an  Irish  Protestant :  he  is  an 
Englishman,  masquerading  as  a  Catholic, 
venting  his  little  anger  on  another  English- 
man. Nor,  to  put  the  argument  in  terms 
of  politics,  is  the  disagreement  between 
Nationalists  and  Unionists  in  Ireland  so 
profound  as  the  disagreement  between 
Liberals  and  Conservatives  in  England. 
Were  it  not  for  the  question  of  Home  Rule, 
many,  the  majority,  of  the  Nationalists 
would  proclaim  themselves  to  be  Tories,  and 
many,  the  majority,  of  the  Unionists  would 
proclaim  themselves  to  be  Radicals.  I  shall 
make  a  more  elaborate  reference  to  this 
probability  later  in  this  book.  My  purpose 
now  is  to  insist  that  in  the  end  of  all  Ireland 
contains  only  Irishmen,  that  the  Ulsterman 
is  as  fiercely  in  love  with  his  mother  Ireland 
as  any  man  in  Connacht  or  Leinster  or 
Munster. 

When  the  last  Home  Rule  controversy  was 
at  its  height,  some  born  fool  proposed  that 
Ulster  should  be  politically  detached  from 

14 


AND    THE    ULSTER   MOVEMENT 

the  rest  of  Ireland  and  politically  attached 
to  Scotland  or  the  Isle  of  Man  or  some  such 
place.    He  might  as  well  have  proposed  that 
it  should  be  physically  detached.     I  have 
never  yet  met  any  Ulsterman  to  whom  this 
proposal  did  not  sound  like  a  proposal  to 
commit  a  horrible  act  of  outrage.     It  was 
made  and  supported  by  people  who  cannot 
rid  their  minds  of  the  belief  that  Ulstermen 
are  not  Irishmen.    These  people  speak  of  us 
as  "  Ulster  Scots,"  a  description  which  we 
strongly  resent.    It  is  as  inept  as  I  should  be 
if  I  were  to  describe  the  fishermen  in  the 
Devonian  village  in  which  I  am  now  living 
as  "  Devon  Spaniards  "  because  they  have 
Spanish  blood  in  their  veins  and  are,  some 
of  them,  less  "  typically  "  English-looking 
than  any  one,  not  a  foreigner,  can  be.     At 
the  risk  of  being  tedious  and  vainly  repe- 
titious, I  wish  to  impress  upon  the  mind  of 
the  Enghsh  reader  this  fact,  that  Ulstermen 
are  Irishmen ;    that  they  are  proud  of  their 
Irishry;     and   that   they   dislike    intensely 
any  suggestion  that  they  are  aliens   in  a 
hostile  land.    It  is  important,  too,  that  the 
Enghsh  reader  should  know  that  Ulstermen 
have  been  as  rebellious,  more  dangerously 
rebellious,  against  the  Enghsh  as  the  "  Irish  " 
have  been.    The  history  of  Ireland  is  full  of 
fine  deeds  done  by  Ulster  Protestants  for 
the    freedom    of    the    country;     and    the 
recollection  of  these  deeds  is  an  act  of  pride 

15 


SIR   EDWARD    CARSON 


on  the  part  of  many  of  the  most  devoted 
adherents  of  the  Orange  Order.  I  remember 
very  vividly  being  taken  by  my  grand- 
mother to  a  street  in  Belfast,  called  Corn 
Market,  and  told  that  that  was  the  place 
where  Henry  Joy  McCracken  was  hanged 
in  1798  for  the  part  he  took  in  the  '98 
Rebellion  which  was  begun  in  Ulster  by 
Presbyterians ;  and  I  remember,  too,  the 
pride  she  had  when  she  told  me  that 
ancestors  of  her  own,  stiff-lipped  farmers 
in  County  Down,  had  had  their  share  in 
shooting  English  soldiers  in  the  eighteenth 
century,  and  were  hanged  for  their  pains. 

The  decorative  difference  between  an 
Ulsterman  and  a  Munsterman,  Northman 
and  Southman,  is  no  greater  than  the 
decorative  difference  between  a  Connacht- 
man  and  a  Leinsterman  (Westman  and  East- 
man). I  have  heard  a  Catholic  in  Meath 
speak  as  bitterly  against  Catholics  in  Cork  as 
an  Englishman  will  sometimes  speak  against 
a  Welshman.  I  have  heard  people  in  Mayo, 
living  on  the  borders  of  Galway,  speak  of  the 
people  of  Connemara  as  if  they  were  natives 
of  the  Nicobar  Islands,  although  the  distance 
between  their  homes  is  no  greater  than  the 
distance  between  Charing  Cross  and  Croy- 
don. The  first  of  the  many  illusions  held 
about  Ireland  by  English  people  which  must 
be  dispelled  is  that  there  are  two  nations 
in  Ireland  :    one,  the  minority,  resident  in 

16 


AND    THE    ULSTER   MOVEMENT 

Ulster  and  composed  of  Protestants,  all  of 
whom  are  thrifty,  industrious,  sober,  honest, 
intelligent,  brave  and  highly  enlightened ;  the 
other,  the  majority,  resident  in  the  remaining 
provinces  and  composed  of  Catholics,  all  of 
whom  are  spendthrift,  lazy,  drunken,  cor- 
rupt, ignorant,  often  cowardly  and  invariably 
superstitious.  Iii  Ulster  itself,  nearly  half  of 
the  population  is  Catholic,  possessed  of  all 
the  characteristic  virtues  and  vices  of  the 
"typical"  Ulster  Protestant,  differing  only 
from  him  in  the  expression  of  their  belief  in 
God. 

There  are  uQt  two  Irelands  and  two  kinds 
of  Irishmen :  there  are  four  millions  of  Irish, 
men,  women  and  children,  each  of  them 
varying  from  all  the  others,  but  all  of  them 
closely  akin  in  their  needs,  and  there  is  only 
one  Ireland,  whole  and  indivisible,  a  nation 
knit,  as  all  nations  are,  out  of  the  incalculable 
dissimilarities  and  resemblances  of  its  people 
into  an  imperishable  unity. 


8 

Politicians  rule  a  country  in  bursts  of 
emotion  :  statesmen  govern  in  the  sweat  of 
their  brains.  Ireland  has  her  statesmen 
(Sir  Horace  Plunkett  is  one  of  them)  just  as 
England  has ;  but,  as  in  England,  so  it  is 
in  Ireland  :    the  politician,  the  journalist, 

B  17 


SIR   EDWARD    CARSON 


the  fluffy-minded  man  are  familiar  to  every- 
one, whereas  the  statesman  is  known  only 
to  a  few.  Journalists  and  politicians  have 
made  and  spread  the  false  generalisations 
that  antagonise  men  and  obscure  the  truth. 
The  Unionist  journalists  and  politicians 
spend  their  days  in  describing  Ulster  as  a 
place  inhabited  mainly  by  archangels  :  the 
exceptions  to  the  archangelic  characters  are, 
of  course,  the  Catholics  and  Nationalists 
whose  diabolical  nature  is  too  terrible  to  be 
calmly  contemplated.  The  rest  of  Ireland, 
save  for  the  saving  grace  of  isolated  Union- 
ists, is  peopled  by  persons  whose  dispositions 
are  of  a  kind  that  cannot  be  discussed  in 
polite  circles.  The  favourite  description  is 
"  cattle-drivers."  The  reader  of  Unionist 
journals  might  easily  imagine,  from  the  tone 
of  the  references  to  "  cattle-driving,"  that 
Irish  Nationalists  take  an  inhuman  delight 
in  torturing  cows  simply  for  the  sake  of 
torturing  them.  It  is  a  fact  that  thousands 
of  "  men  in  the  street  "  in  England  literally 
do  not  know  that  "cattle-driving"  is  the 
Irish  agricultural  equivalent  of  strikes,  that 
it  is  the  means  employed  by  the  workless 
farm  labourer  to  express  his  discontent  at 
the  conversion  of  tilled  lands  into  grasslands. 
The  "  cattle-drivers  "  may  or  may  not  be 
cruel  to  the  beasts  they  drive.  It  is  probable 
that  some  of  them  are,  and  it  is  equally 
probable  that  some  of  them  are  not.    The 

18 


AND    THE    ULSTER   MOVEMENT 

practice  is  reprehensible,  but  it  is  not  any 
more  reprehensible  than  the  acts  of  sabotage 
and  personal  violence  with  which  workmen 
in  Belfast  have  from  time  to  time  conducted 
strikes.    I  am  not  here  defending  or  denounc- 
ing strikes,  though  in  ninety-nine  cases  out 
of  a  hundred  I  would  say  that  the  strikers 
are  in  the  right :    I  am  merely  asking  the 
reader  to  note  that  conduct  which,   in   a 
Belfast  workman,  is  described  by  Unionist 
journals    as    "industrial    disorder"    is,    in 
agricultural    labourers    in    Nationalist    dis- 
tricts, described  as  "crime."    The  Unionist 
journals,  moreover,  always  give  their  readers 
the    impression    that     "  cattle-driving "    is 
conducted  at  the  expense  of  Protestants, 
whereas  it  is  mainly  conducted  at  the  ex- 
pense of  Catholics.    The  grievance  of  the 
workless   labourer    is    not    that    the    large 
grazier  is  a  Protestant  or  a  Cathohc  :   it  is 
that  he  is  a  large  grazier  and  that  fewer 
men  are  employed  on  grasslands  and  cattle 
ranches  than  are  employed  on  lands  imder 
tillage. 

I  have  chosen  this  instance  of  "cattle- 
driving  "  as  an  example  of  the  method  that 
is  employed  by  politicians  and  journalists 
to  misrepresent  facts  and  distort  truth.  It 
IS  a  method  which  is  employed  by  Liberals 
and  Nationalists  with  as  much  readiness  as 
It  is  employed  by  Unionists.  Hysterical 
journahsts  such  as  Mr.  Arnold  White,  on 

19 


SIR   EDWARD    CARSON 


the  Tory  side,  and  Mr.  Harold  Begbie,  on 
the  Liberal  side,  are  examples  of  the  kind  of 
roaring  jackass  who  is  periodically  let  loose 
on  the  English  press  to  the  utter  confusion 
of  the  English  people.  The  appalling  stuff 
which  was  written  about  the  Kaiser  and  the 
German  people  by  Mr.  Arnold  White  in  the 
early  days  of  the  European  Disaster  was  on 
a  par  with  the  kind  of  stuff  that  was  written 
about  Sir  Edward  Grey  and  the  English 
people  by  the  more  neurotic  of  the  Prussian 
Professors.  It  was  not  any  less  senseless 
than  the  lunatic  writing  that  was  printed 
about  Ireland  by  journalists  on  both  sides 
at  the  height  of  the  Home  Rule  controversy. 
Mr.  Harold  Begbie,  who  is  what  Mr.  Rudyard 
Kipling  might  be  if  he  were  to  join  the 
Salvation  Army,  solemnly  assured  the  readers 
of  the  London  "Daily  Chronicle"  that  little 
children  never  smile  in  Belfast !  .  .  . 


At  this  point,  the  English  reader,  whose 
mind  is  still  *'  moidhered,"  as  we  say  in 
Ulster,  by  the  false  generalisations  of  the 
politicians  and  the  journalists,  will  say  to 
himself,  "  I  am  prepared  to  admit  that  all 
the  sober,  industrious,  energetic  Irishmen 
are  not  confined  within  the  boundaries  of 
the    '  north-east    corner,'    but    surely   it   is 

20 


AND   THE    ULSTER   MOVEMENT 

broadly  true  to  say  that  Ulster,  and  par- 
ticularly Protestant  Ulster,  contains  re- 
sourceful and  industrious  people,  while  the 
other  provinces  of  Ireland  contain  easy- 
going and  slack  people.  Look  at  the  Board 
of  Trade  Returns  and  the  statistics  of 
Pauperism  !  .  .  ."  He  may  even  hunt  up 
newspaper  cuttings  showing  that  Belfast  has 
a  rate  of  pauperism  which  is  about  a  third 
of  that  of  Dublin  and  about  half  of  the 
average  rate  of  pauperism  for  the  whole  of 
the  United  Kingdom.  He  may  say  to  him- 
self, "These  statistics  prove  that  there  are 
three  times  as  many  paupers  in  Dublin  as 
there  are  in  Belfast.  Dublin  is  mainly 
Catholic  and  Nationalist,  whereas  Belfast  is 
mainly  Protestant  and  Unionist,  therefore 
no  Home  Rule  for  Ireland  ! " 

In  the  chapter  which  follows  this  one,  I 
shall  draw  a  picture  of  Ireland  in  contrast 
with  England,  and  I  will  then  deal  very 
fully  with  this  fact ;  but  I  shall  end  this 
chapter  by  begging  the  reader  to  exercise  his 
historic  sense  as  well  as  his  common  sense. 
A  certain  pride  in  Belfast  causes  its  inhabi- 
tants to  speak  and  write  of  it  as  if  it  were 
the  Delectable  City ;  but  even  the  most 
bigoted  Belfastman  will  admit  that  there 
are  lazy,  drunken,  stupid  and  thriftless  men 
in  Belfast,  and  that  there  are  men  in 
Connacht  whose  industry  and  thrift  are  an 
affront  to  humanity.    Enormous  energy  and 

21 


SIR   EDWARD    CARSON 


enterprise  are  to  be  discovered  in  Belfast,  and 
a  Belfastman  may,  in  most  cases,  be  trusted 
to  do  his  job  as  thoroughly  as  it  can  be  done ; 
but  equal  energy  and  resource  may  be  dis- 
covered in  the  rest  of  Ireland.  The  skill  and 
enterprise  shown  in  the  making  of  the 
biggest  and  best  boats  in  the  world  are 
equalled,  on  their  own  plane,  by  the  skill  and 
enterprise  shown  by  the  peasants  on  the 
western  seaboard  who  have  literally  turned 
bare  bog-land  into  cultivable  farms  with 
few  resources  beyond  their  fingers  and  the 
kelp  they  tore  from  the  sea. 

It  is  true  that  in  the  history  of  Ireland, 
the  mass  of  the  Irish  people  have  had  the 
appearance,  the  reality,  even,  of  being  lazy, 
dirty  and  thriftless  ;  but  these  appearances 
may  be  explained  historically,  and,  as  I  shall 
show  later,  they  are  becoming  less  and  less 
characteristic  of  the  people.  A  disturbed 
nation,  in  which  the  overwhelming  majority 
of  the  people  have  no  certain  tenure  of  the 
means  of  life,  is  inevitably  a  nation  in  which 
the  people  will  display  a  carelessness  of 
attitude  towards  existence.  Any  disturbed, 
insecure  class  is  a  shiftless  class,  and  the 
condition  of  the  Irish  Catholic  farmer  in  the 
days  when  land  teniure  in  Ireland  was  a 
precarious  thing  was  exactly  analogous  to 
the  condition  of  the  casual  dock  labourer  in 
the  Port  of  Liverpool  or  the  Port  of  London. 
When  thrift  and  industry  are  deliberately 

22 


AND    THE    ULSTER    MOVEMENT 

penalised,  as  they  were  in  Ireland,  it  is 
natural  that  they  should  be  replaced  by 
recklessness  and  loafing.  The  English  govern- 
ing class  in  the  first  six  months  of  the 
European  Disaster  discovered  that  in  con- 
senting to  permit  employers  to  utilise  the 
services  of  dock  labourers  in  a  casual  manner 
they  were  digging  a  pit  for  their  own  down- 
fall ;  for  the  men,  demoralised  by  irregular 
employment  in  normal  times,  were  in  no 
mood  for  constant  work  when  the  war  began. 
Statesmen  have  constantly  urged  Parliament 
to  deal  with  the  problem  of  the  casual 
labourer.  Mr.  and  Mrs.  Sidney  Webb  have 
spent  their  lives,  not  merely  in  urging  that 
such  labours  should  be  decasualised,  but 
have  actually  devised  a  means  whereby  it 
may  be  done ;  but  it  was  not  until  the  war 
came  that  the  politicians  could  be  persuaded 
to  see  in  what  direction  they  were  letting  the 
country  drift ;  and  even  then,  it  was  not  a 
politician,  but  a  soldier.  Lord  Kitchener, 
who  began  the  process  of  decasualising  dock 
labour  in  Liverpool  by  means  of  a  Dockers' 
Regiment. 

British  statesmanship  did  for  the  casual 
Irish  farmer  what  British  statesmanship 
ought  long  ago  to  have  done  for  the  casual 
dock  labourer :  it  decasualised  him ;  it 
gave  security  of  tenure  to  him ;  it  removed 
the  penalties  which  formerly  attached  to 
energy  and  industry ;   it  put  the  farmer  in 

28 


SIR   EDWARD    CARSON 


a  position  to  profit  by  his  own  industry. 
The  Irish  farmer's  passion  for  land  has 
survived  persecution  and  the  shiftlessness 
that  often  follows  persecution.  The  effects 
of  the  long  generations  of  disturbance  and 
insecurity  cannot  be  obliterated  in  a  single 
generation,  but  they  are  in  process  of  being 
obliterated ;  and  when  I  make  my  picture 
of  Ireland  in  contrast  with  England,  I  hope 
to  show  (a)  the  distinguishing  differences 
between  England  and  Ireland ;  (b)  the 
change  that  has  taken  place  in  Ireland  since 
the  enactment  of  the  Land  Purchase  Laws 
and  the  development  of  the  Co-operative 
Movement ;  and  (c)  the  remarkable  manner 
in  which  this  change  has  begun  to  alter  the 
general  positions  of  the  agricultural  and  the 
industrial  populations  in  Ireland. 


24 


V 


CHAPTER   II 


If  the  reader  examines  a  map  of  England 
and  Ireland,  he  instantly  observes  that  a 
line  may  be  drawn  across  the  middle  of 
England,  dividing  it  in  half,  the  halves 
being  very  dissimilar  from  each  other.  Even 
physically,  this  is  true  of  England,  but  it  is 
much  more  true,  socially  and  politically  and 
economically.  The  northern  half  of  England 
is  mainly  industrial :  the  southern  half  is 
mainly  agricultural ;  the  northern  half  con- 
tains  a  large  population  which  is  congre- 
gated into  small  areas  :  the  southern  half, 
excluding  London,  contains  a  small  popula- 
tion distributed  over  wide  areas.  The 
lowest  rates  of  pauperism  in  England  are  to 
be  found  in  the  northern  half :  the  largest 
rates  are  to  be  found  in  the  southern  half. 
The  people  of  the  northern  half  of  England 
are  mainly  Radical  or  Labour  in  politics  : 
the  people  in  the  southern  half  are  mainly 
Conservative  in  politics.  If  the  reader  takes 
the  table  of  Poor  Law  Unions  with  the 
highest  and  the  lowest  rates  of  pauperism, 
published  in  the  Majority  Report  of  the 
Poor  Law  Commission,  he  will  find  that  the 

25 


SIR    EDWARD    CARSON 


districts  with  the  highest  rates  return  Con- 
servative members  to  Parhament,  whereas 
the  districts  with  the  lowest  rates  return 
Radical  or  Labour  members. 

Ireland  cannot  be  divided  in  this  fashion  ; 
for  Ireland  is  mainly  an  agricultural  country. 
Its  industrial  areas  are  small  and  scattered 
in  various  parts  of  the  island.  The  most 
striking  difierence  between  England  and 
Ireland,  however,  apart  from  the  differences 
of  wealth  and  educational  systems,  is  the 
remarkable  difference  in  what  I  may  call 
the  incidence  of  politics.  An  industrial 
population  is  usually  a  Radical  or  Labour 
electorate,  and  an  agricultural  population 
is  usually  a  Conservative  electorate.  That, 
broadly  speaking,  is  the  position  of  political 
affairs  in  England  ;  but  it  is  not  the  position 
of  political  affairs  in  Ireland.  The  industrial 
population  of  Ulster  (where  the  great  bulk 
of  the  industrial  population  of  Ireland 
resides)  returns  Conservatives  to  the  House 
of  Commons  :  the  agricultural  population  of 
Ulster  and  of  the  rest  of  Ireland  returns 
members  who  support  the  Liberal  Party. 
This  state  of  affairs  may  appear  to  the 
English  reader  to  be  part  of  the  perversity 
of  Irish  conditions  of  life  ;  but  the  explana- 
tion of  it  is  quite  simple.  The  industrial 
population  of  Ireland  is  really  a  Radical, 
almost  Republican,  population,  and  the 
agricultural    population    is    really    a    very 

26 


AND    THE    ULSTER   MOVEMENT 

Conservative  population.  Their  attachment 
to  their  opposites  is  due  solely  to  the  fact 
that  the  farmer  wants  Home  Rule,  whereas 
the  industrial  worker  wishes  to  maintain  the 
Union.  The  farmer  wants  Home  Rule  because 
he  is  an  Irishman  :  the  industrial  worker 
wishes  to  maintain  the  Union  because  he 
is  profoundly  afraid  of  the  Roman  Catholic 
Church.  The  fear  of  the  Pope  is  the  be- 
ginning and  the  end  of  the  Belfast  "  man  in 
the  street's  "  objection  to  Home  Rule. 

There  are  no  politics  in  Ireland  :  there 
are  two  religions.  And  this  absence  of  real 
politics  has  led  to  many  remarkable  unities 
and  many  more  remarkable  separations. 
Ireland,  indeed,  is  the  land  of  false  unities 
and  false  cleavages ;  and  the  immediate 
effect  of  Home  Rule  will  be  the  dispersal  of 
incongruous  groups  and  the  assembhng  of 
new  and  more  congenial  groups.  There  is 
something  ridiculous  in  the  union  in  one 
party  of  such  men  as  Parnell  and  Michael 
Davitt  or  Mr.  John  Redmond  and  Mr. 
Joseph  Devlin  or,  to  take  a  more  remark- 
able instance,  of  Mr.  William  Murphy  and 
Mr.  James  Larkin.  Parnell,  a  man  of 
Protestant  and  aristocratic  origin,  was  a 
landlord :  Davitt,  the  son  of  Catholic 
peasants,  was  a  land  nationaliser.  Mr. 
Redmond  is  a  Tory :  Mr.  Devlin  is  a 
Radical.  Mr.  William  Murphy  is  a  capitalist 
of  a  type  that  is  almost  obsolete  in  England : 

27 


SIR   EDWARD    CARSON 


Mr.  Larkin  is  a  Syndicalist.  With  the  living 
of  these,  but  antagonistic  to  all  of  them,  are 
Mr.  William  O'Brien,  the  elderly  Ishmael, 
and  Mr.  Timothy  Healy,  the  man  with  a 
tongue  like  a  poisoned  arrow.  All  these 
men  are  Nationalists.  Similar  disparities 
may  be  discovered  among  the  Unionists  : 
the  unskilled  labourer,  earning  14s.  or  16s. 
per  week,  in  a  linen  mill  in  Belfast,  and  the 
millionaire  mill-owner  who  sweats  the  life 
and  brains  out  of  him,  vote  alike,  even  when 
they  are  bitterly  denouncing  each  other  in 
the  course  of  an  industrial  dispute. 

Real  politics  are  impossible  in  a  country 
where  men  are  so  falsely  united  and  so 
falsely  separated.  It  has  not  hitherto  been 
possible  to  get  Irishmen  to  discuss  real 
politics  because  of  the  general  plea  that 
nothing  should  be  done  or  said  to  divide  the 
ranks  and  thus  imperil  the  Union  or  the 
chances  of  Home  Rule ;  and  so,  year  after 
year,  grave  abuses  and  scandals  have  per- 
sisted and  extended  in  Ireland  until  at  last 
Belfast  is  known  to  be  the  city  with  the 
foulest  sweating  system  in  Europe,  while 
Dublin  is  a  by-word  for  the  corruption  of 
its  municipal  authorities  and  the  vileness  of 
its  housing  system.  When  the  new  Parlia- 
ment meets  on  College  Green  after  the 
declaration  of  peace,  there  will  be  a  curious 
confusion.  The  electorate  will  probably 
return  the  men  who  now  represent  them  in 

28 


AND   THE    ULSTER   MOVEMENT 

the  Imperial  Parliament  to  the  Irish  Parlia- 
ment ;  but  none  of  them  will  have  any 
notion  of  why  they  are  returning  them  or 
what  they  are  to  do  when  they  are  returned. 
The  first  task  of  the  members  and  the 
Government  will  be,  not  to  carry  out  a  pro- 
gramme, but  to  discover  one.  And  then 
will  begin  the  desirable  process  of  dis- 
integration and  new  grouping.  Mr.  Red- 
mond will  discover  fundamental  differences 
between  his  view  of  things  and  Mr.  Devlin's. 
Mr.  Healy  will  enlarge  his  stores  of  venom 
and  be  as  useless  in  Ireland  as  he  is  in 
England.  Captain  Craig  will  be  utterly 
amazed  to  find  that  he  and  Mr.  Redmond 
think  alike.  Allies  will  become  enemies,  and 
enemies  will  become  allies.  There  will  be 
bitter  quarrels  among  former  colleagues,  and 
astonishing  reconciliations  between  former 
foes.  And  while  this  process  of  disintegra- 
tion and  regrouping  is  being  worked  out 
among  the  politicians,  a  greater  and  more 
wonderful  and  more  desirable  process  of  dis- 
integration will  be  worked  out  among  the 
common  men.  The  Nationalist  workman 
in  Dublin  and  the  Orange  workman  in 
Belfast,  when  their  minds  are  freed  from 
the  preoccupations  of  Home  Rule,  will  begin 
to  wonder  what  are  the  things  they  wish  to 
see  done  by  Parliament.  Some  wit  has  said 
that  it  will  be  difficult  to  tell  who  will  be  the 
more  astonished  on  the  morning  after  the 

29 


SIR   EDWARD    CARSON 


establishment  of  Home  Rule  :  the  National- 
ist who  finds  that  he  has  to  get  up  and 
go  to  work  as  usual  or  the  Orangeman 
who  finds  that  his  throat  has  not  been 
cut  in  the  night.  When  the  workmen  have 
recovered  from  that  astonishment,  they  will 
wonder  why  they  ever  acted  separately, 
Orangemen  in  one  camp,  Catholics  in 
another  ;  and  when  that  process  of  specula- 
tion is  set  in  motion,  the  onlookers  may 
expect  to  see  many  strange  things '  happen- 
ing in  Ireland. 


In  the  first  chapter  of  this  book,  I  stated 
that  industrial  virtue  is  not  confined  to 
Ulster  and  that  industrial  vice  is  not  confined 
to  the  remaining  provinces.  I  ought  to  have 
added  that  prosperity  is  not  confined  to 
Ulster  and  poverty  to  Catholic  Ireland. 
Belfast  is  favourably  situated  for  the  pur- 
poses of  fortune,  although  her  harbour  is 
a  poor  one  in  comparison,  say,  with  Galway, 
an  impoverished  and  declining  city.  Belfast 
is  near  to  the  industrial  areas  and  coal-fields 
of  England  and  Scotland  ;  whereas  Galway 
is  remote  from  them.  A  great  deal  of  the 
prosperity  of  Belfast  is  due  to  circumstances 
that  were  not  created  by  Belfastmen,  just 
as  a  great  deal  of  the  poverty  of  Galway  is 
due  to  circumstances  over  which  the  Galway- 

30 


AND    THE    ULSTER   MOVEMENT 

men  have  no  control.  It  was  roughly  true, 
thirty  or  forty  years  ago,  to  say  that  Ulster 
was  the  rich  province  of  Ireland,  and  that 
Leinster,  Munster  and  Connacht  were  the 
poor  provinces  :  it  is  still  largely  true  to 
say  so.  There  was  a  more  general  diffusion 
of  wealth  and  comfort  throughout  "  the 
north-east  corner  "  of  Ireland  than  through- 
out the  rest  of  the  country.  The  workman 
in  Belfast  was,  on  the  whole,  better  off  than 
the  farmer  in  Roscommon.  That  statement 
of  affairs,  however,  is  not  so  true  now  as  it 
was  before  the  passage  of  the  various  Land 
Purchase  Laws  and  the  development  of  the 
Co-operative  Movement,  and  it  is  becoming 
less  true  every  day.  The  aggregate  wealth 
of  Ulster  is  probably  greater  than  the 
aggregate  wealth  of  the  rest  of  Ireland,  but 
the  individual  wealth  of  the  rest  of  Ireland 
is  now  almost  certainly  greater  than  the 
individual  wealth  of  Ulster.  At  all  events, 
it  is  in  process  of  becoming  so.  The  Irish 
farmer  now  owns,  or  will  in  course  of  time 
own,  his  farm ;  the  Belfast  workman  owns 
nothing  but  his  physical  energy.  In  the 
last  resort,  the  farmer  can  maintain  some 
sort  of  life  on  the  produce  of  his  farm,  but 
in  the  last  resort  the  Belfast  workman 
cannot  maintain  himself  at  all,  but  must 
subsist  on  charity  or  on  the  Poor  Law.  There 
are  a  great  many  very  rich  men  in  Belfast, 
some  of  whom  are  millionaires,  and  there 

81 


SIR   EDWARD    CARSON 


are  hardly  any  very  rich  men  in  Miinster 
and  Connaeht.  But  a  wealthy  city  is  not 
one  in  which  there  are  many  millionaires  : 
that  is  a  poor  city.  A  wealthy  city  is  one  in 
which  there  is  a  high  level  of  general  well- 
being  ;  and  in  such  a  city  there  are  no 
millionaires  at  all.  The  enactment  of  the 
Land  Purchase  Laws  revolutionised  Ireland  ; 
and  the  end  of  that  revolution  has  not  yet 
been  reached. 


8 

The  establishment  of  peasant  proprietor- 
ship in  Ireland  was  accompanied  by  the 
development  of  a  very  extraordinary,  indi- 
vidual movement,  now,  of  course,  well  known 
as  the  Irish  Co-operative  Movement.  It  is 
not  my  purpose  in  this  book  to  tell  the 
history  of  that  movement.  Sir  Horace 
Plunkett  has  done  so  in  "  Ireland  in  the 
New  Century,"  and  so  has  my  friend,  Mr. 
George  W.  Russell  ("^"),  in  a  brilliant 
brochure  called  "  Co-operation  and  Nation- 
ality." The  Englishman  who  is  eager  to 
learn  something  of  the  Ireland  that  matters 
will  not  omit  to  read  these  two  remarkable 
books.  The  story  of  Sir  Horace  Plunkett's 
persistence  in  propagating  the  principles  of 

82 


ii' 


AND    THE    ULSTER   MOVEMENT 

co-operation  in  Ireland  reads  almost  like  a 
saga.  Here  was  a  man  of  shy,  hesitant 
manner,  totally  devoid  of  any  gifts  of  speech, 
having  none  of  the  florid  personality  which 
appeals  to  the  man  in  the  street,  unknown 
outside  a  limited  circle  of  people  and  suspect 
to  the  majority  of  his  countrymen  because 
of  his  faith  and  his  politics  (he  belonged  to  a 
Conservative  and  Protestant  family),  here 
was  a  man,  handicapped  by  all  these  dis- 
abilities, who  proposed  to  take  a  people 
made  feckless  by  centuries  of  disturbance 
and  persecution  and  turn  them  into  a  people 
of  resource  and  substance  and  enterprise.  It 
was  an  extraordinarily  Utopian  proposal, 
and  as  such  it  was  treated  by  every  person 
to  whom  Sir  Horace  spoke  of  it.  No  one 
encouraged  him  :  everyone  discouraged  him. 
Some  people  said  that  the  Irish  were  too 
suspicious  of  each  other  ever  to  co-operate. 
He  was  reminded  of  the  political  and 
religious  difficulties.  He  was  told  that  the 
Protestants  and  the  Catholics  would  not 
work  together,  that  the  Orangemen  and 
the  Nationalists  would  break  each  other's 
crowns.  The  priests  would  be  against  him; 
the  Church  of  Ireland  (the  comical  descrip- 
tion given  to  themselves  by  the  Episco- 
palians) would  be  against  him ;  the  politicians 
would  be  against  him ;  the  landlords  would 
be  against  him ;  and  more  important  still, 
the  people  themselves  would  be  against  him* 

c  33 


SIR   EDWARD    CARSON 


These  and  similar  statements  were  made  in 
every  conceivable  quarter. 

The  natural  pessimism  of  the  ordinary 
observers  of  Irish  life  was  reinforced  by  the 
active  antagonism  of  the  politicians  who 
declared  that  if  Sir  Horace  were  successful 
in  achieving  what  he  proposed  to  do  (which 
they  did  not  for  one  moment  believe),  then 
the  agrarian  interest  in  Home  Rule  would 
slacken,  since  Home  Rule,  to  the  farmer, 
meant  not  Irish  nationaUsm  so  much  as  the 
right  to  own  his  own  farm  and  lead  a  fairly 
comfortable  life.  The  opposition  of  the 
Nationalist  members  of  Parliament  has  per- 
sisted to  this  day.  To  this  opposition  I 
will  make  further  reference  in  another 
chapter. 

Sir  Horace  Plunkett  was  not  discouraged. 
Opposition  and  gloomy  prophecies  seemed 
to  stir  him  to  greater  energies.  He  spent  his 
days  and  nights  in  travelling,  wet  or  fine, 
from  one  small  town  or  village  to  another 
in  remote,  difficult  districts,  making  ex- 
planatory speeches  to  ill-informed  and  dis- 
trustful farmers,  many  of  whom  only 
listened  to  him  under  the  duress  of  the 
parish  priest.  (The  priests,  it  may  be  added, 
were  on  the  whole  the  best  friends  Sir 
Horace  could  find  in  those  days.)  He 
enlisted  the  services  of  Mr.  George  W. 
Russell  and  Father  Tom  Finlay  and  Mr. 
Robert   A.  Anderson.    He  set  their  minds 

84 


AND    THE    ULSTER   MOVEMENT 

afire  with  the  flame  of  his  own  enthusiasm, 
and  compelled  them  to  work  for  the  move- 
ment as  unsparingly  as  he  himself  worked 
for  it.  There  is  something  almost  fabulous 
in  the  story  of  this  tongue-tied  man  inspiring 
so  fiery  a  prophet  as  Mr.  George  Russell 
("  ^  "),  tearing  him  from  the  company  of 
fairies  and  leprechauns  and  heavenly  hosts 
and  poems  and  pictures  and  all  mystical 
things,  and  setting  him  down  in  the  midst 
of  sullen,  forbidding  farmers  to  teach  them 
how  to  combine  for  the  good  of  themselves 
and  their  country. 


4 

George  Russell  is  an  unique  figure.  He  is 
a  poet  and  a  painter  and  a  mystic  and  the 
editor  of  an  agricultural  journal,  The 
Irish  Homestead,  which  contains  the  best 
journahsm  in  Ireland  and  possibly  in  these 
islands.  Its  readers,  attracted  to  it  by  the 
personality  of  its  editor,  include  people  who 
scarcely  know  the  difference  between  a 
steam  plough  and  a  steam  kettle.  "  ^," 
of  whom  there  is  a  powerful  account  in  the 
second  volume  of  Mr.  George  Moore's  trilogy, 
"  Hail  and  Farewell,"  writes  of  Irish  agri- 
culture and  co-operation  as  an  apostle  might 

35 


SIB   EDWARD    CARSON 


have  written  of  the  Christian  religion.  He 
maintains  the  interest  of  the  least  bucolic 
of  his  readers  by  the  strength  of  his  own 
interest,  and  he  discourses  on  swine  fever 
with  something  of  the  familiarity  and  ease 
with  which  he  discourses  of  the  Essential 
Inner  Being.  The  only  yoems,  if  one  ex- 
cludes one  by  Mr.  Thomas  Hardy,  which 
were  printed  in  The  Times  during  the' 
European  Disaster  were  written  by  "iE." 
Like  all  men  of  generous  nature,  he  possesses 
uncommon  powers  of  invective,  as  the  Dub- 
lin employers  discovered  in  1913  when  they 
tried  to  starve  their  workpeople  into  sub- 
mission to  terms  of  labour  which,  as  even 
The  Times  declared,  were  the  most  scan- 
dalous in  Europe.  One  cannot  adequately 
describe  George  Russell.  He  is  a  tremendous 
personality.  You  feel  his  presence  before 
you  see  him.  Force  and  power  and  great 
sanity  of  thought  are  extraordinarily  blended 
in  his  nature.  "  Russell  is  a  sort  of  Irish 
Chesterton,"  my  friend,  Mr.  Bernard  Shaw, 
once  wrote  to  me,  "  kept  sane  by  his  con- 
tact with  the  Plunkett  co-operative  organi- 
sation and  by  the  clearness  of  his  Irish 
head."  No  one  who  has  ever  encountered 
him  has  ever  failed  to  realise  his  greatness. 
He  and  Sir  Horace  Plunkett  are  great 
Irishmen,  perhaps  the  greatest  of  all  Irish- 
men. 


36 


AND    THE    ULSTER   MOVEMENT 


Their  greatness  may  be  measured  by  the 
fact  that  in  twenty-two  years  the  Irish 
Agricultural  Organisation  Society  grew  from 
nothing  to  a  body  controlling  924  different 
societies  with  an  estimated  annual  turnover 
of  £2,750,000.  I  have  extracted  an  account 
of  the  activities  of  the  I.A.O.S.  and  its 
affiliated  bodies  from  "  ^E's  "  book,  "Co- 
operation and  Nationality,"  in  order  that 
the  reader  may  form  a  general  opinion  of  the 
work  that  the  Society  is  performing.  "  I 
am  not  going  to  give  any  minute  description 
of  the  various  kinds  of  rural  associations 
promoted  by  the  Irish  Agricultural  Organi- 
sation Society.  Nearly  everybody  is  by  this 
time  more  or  less  familiar  with  the  work  of 
creameries,  agricultural,  poultry,  flax,  home 
industry,  and  credit  societies.  The  dairy 
societies  have  released  the  farmer  from  the 
bondage  of  the  butter  merchant  and  pro- 
prietor, and  given  back  to  him  the  control 
of  the  processes  of  manufacture  and  sale^ 
In  the  credit  societies  farmers  join  together^ 
and,  creating  by  their  union  a  greater 
security  than  any  of  them  could  offer  indi- 
vidually, they  are  able  to  get  money  to 
finance  their  farming  operations  at  very 
low  rates.  The  joint-stock  banks  lend  money 
to  these  societies  on  wholesale  terms,  letting 

37 


SIR   EDWARD   CARSON 


them  retail  it  again  among  their  members. 
Generally  speaking,  it  has  been  found  pos- 
sible to  borrow  money  at  from  three  to  four 
per  cent,  and  to  lend  it  for  productive  pur- 
poses at  the  popular  rate  of  one  penny  a 
month  for  every  pound  employed.  .  .  .  The 
poultry  societies  collect  the  eggs  of  their 
members,  they  grade  and  pack  them  properly 
and  market  them  through  their  own  agencies. 
The  flax  societies  erect  or  hire  scutch  mills, 
and  see  that  the  important  work  of  scutching 
the  flax  is  performed  with  the  requisite  care. 
The  agricultural  societies  purchase  seeds, 
implements,  fertilisers,  feeding  stuffs,  and 
agricultural  requirements  for  their  members. 
Many  of  them  hold  thousands  of  pounds' 
worth  of  machinery  too  expensive  for  the 
individual  farmer  to  buy.  The  societies  buy 
their  requirements  at  wholesale  prices  and 
ensure  good  quality.  The  home  industries' 
societies  have  made  hopeful  beginnings  with 
lace,  crochet,  embroidery,  and  rug-making 
to  provide  work  for  country  girls.  About 
one  himdred  thousand  Irish  country  people 
are  already  members  of  co-operative  societies 
and  their  trade  turnover  this  year  (1912)  will 
be  dose  on  three  million  pounds.  The  total 
trade  turnover  of  the  movement,  from  its 
inception  to  the  present,  is  over  twenty-five 
million  pounds." 


88 


AND    THE    ULSTER   MOVEMENT 


6 

I  make  a  new  section  here  so  that  I  may 
more  clearly  emphasise  the  importance  of 
these  two  great  concurrent  movements  in 
Ireland,  the  movement  towards  the  estab- 
lishment of  peasant  proprietorship  and  the 
movement  towards  the  establishment  of 
co-operative  enterprise ;  and  I  beg  the 
reader  to  remember,  in  considering  the 
future  of  Ireland,  that  the  I.A.O.S.  is  not 
yet  thirty  years  old,  that  many  of  its  efforts 
are  still  in  the  experimental  stage,  that  it 
still  has  a  vast  number  of  handicaps  to  bear 
and,  finally,  that  there  is  a  very  powerful 
opposition  to  it,  engineered  by  gombeen- 
men* and  publicans,  and  greatly  assisted  by 
the  policy  of  Mr.  T.  W.  Russell,  the  chameleon 
of  politics.  If  the  reader  will  remember  the 
extraordinary  growth  of  the  I.A.O.S.  and 
the  wide  change  made  in  Irish  agricultural 
affairs  by  the  Land  Purchase  Acts,  he  will  see 
that  another  twenty-five  years  of  develop- 

*  A  gombeen-man  is  a  middleman  who  has  turned  himself 
into  a  kind  of  moneylender.  He  gives  long  credit  to  the 
farmers  on  condition  that  they  sell  their  produce  to  him  (at 
prices  which  he  fixes)  and  buy  all  their  goods  from  him  (also 
at  prices  which  he  fixes).  The  social  injury  which  such  men 
can  do  is  obvious.  In  England  something  of  the  equivalent  of 
the  gombeen  man  is  to  be  found  in  the  d^ers  who  buy  catches 
from  fishermen.  Mr.  Stephen  Reynolds  makes  many  references 
to  these  people  in  his  admirable  books  on  Devonshire  fishermen, 
"  A  Poor  Man's  House,"  " Seems  So,"  and  «  How  Twas." 

89 


SIR   EDWARD    CARSON 


ment  will  mean  a  remarkably  prosperous 
agricultural  Ireland.  It  may  even  be  that 
the  poverty  of  the  towns  may  be  intensified 
at  the  time  that  the  enrichment  of  the  rural 
areas  is  growing  ;  for  the  European  Disaster 
of  1914  brought  much  wealth  to  farmers  and 
much  suffering  to  the  urban  working-classes. 
The  linen  mills  in  Belfast,  like  the  cotton 
mills  in  Lancashire,  were  terribly  hurt  by 
the  war.  If  the  reader  will  add  the  excep- 
tional suffering  caused  by  the  Disaster  to 
the  normal  suffering  caused  by  the  chaos  of 
the  industrial  system,  and  will  remember 
that  Belfast  has  a  deplorable  record  as  a 
centre  of  sweated  industries,  it  will  not  be 
difficult  for  him  to  understand  that  life  in 
Ireland,  on  the  whole,  is  a  happier  and  more 
prosperous  one  for  the  peasant  (generally 
speaking,  a  Catholic)  than  it  is  for  the  work- 
man (generally  speaking,  a  Protestant). 


There  is,  then,  a  strange  and  wonderful 
renascence  in  Ireland,  a  quickening  of  old 
bones  with  new  life,  a  great,  outspreading 
development  which  will  culminate  one  day 
in  an  Ireland  which  is  as  prosperous  and 
developed  as  is  Denmark  now.  In  every 
nation  there  is  a  smother  of  activities  that 
seem  aimless  and  confused  to  the  careless 


40 


AND    THE    ULSTER    MOVEMENT 

beholder,  but  somewhere  in  the  midst  of 
them,  clear-eyed,  cool-brained  workers  are 
guiding  the  chaos  towards  coherence.  Int 
little  country  towns  and  remote  villages  in 
Ireland  there  are  young  men,  inspired  by 
Sir  Horace  Plunkett  and  "  iE,"  who  are 
formulating  a  synthesis  of  Irish  life.  They 
are  few  in  number  now  and,  for  many 
reasons,  not  fully  articulate,  but  they  will 
grow  in  strength  and  power.  They  have 
done  with  old  angers  and  ancient  rages  and 
the  bitter  wrangling  of  semi-dotards,  nor 
have  they  any  interest  in  internecine  quarrels, 
the  differences  between  Catholic  and  Pro- 
testant, Orangeman  and  Ancient  Hibernian. 
They  are  bored  by  "the  sorrows  of  Ireland  "; 
they  do  not  desire  ever  again  to  hear  of  the 
horrors  of  the  Great  Famine  or  of  any 
famine,  for  they  are  resolved  that,  so  far  as 
is  humanly  possible,  Ireland  shall  know  no 
more  famine.  They  are  tired  to  death  of 
rhetoricians  such  as  Mr.  John  Redmond ; 
they  are  sick  of  oratory  and  Irish- Americans 
andCurse-the-Pope-put-your-fut-in-his-belly 
Orangemen ;  and  above  all  they  are  tired  of 
Ireland  in  the  part  of  Lazarus  whining  for 
crumbs  from  England's  table.  Here  and 
there,  these  Young  Irishmen  discover  in  the 
old  ascendancy  a  man  from  whom  they  can 
hope  for  some  help  :  Lord  Dunraven,  Lord 
Fingall,  Lord  Monteagle ;  and  perhaps  Lord 
Ashbourne,  though  their  interest  in  hrni  is 

41 


SIR   EDWARD   CARSON 


archaic  rather  than  sociological ;  but,  while 
they  are  glad  to  have  the  encouragement  and 
help  of  these  men,  they  are  resolved  that 
they  shall  enter  into  the  heritage  of  freemen 
by  their  own  exertions.  A  mollycoddled 
Ireland,  to  them,  is  an  abomination ;  but 
an  Ireland  which  has  risen  in  agony  and 
bloody  sweat  to  the  realisation  of  a  great 
destiny  is  to  them  a  beautiful  land,  com- 
manding and  receiving  all  their  services. 
"  Nature,"  wrote  "  ^,"  "  has  no  intention 
of  allowing  her  divine  brood,  made  in  the 
image  of  Deity,  to  dwindle  away  into  a  crew 
of  little,  feeble,  feverish  city  folk.  She  has 
other  and  more  grandiose  futures  before 
humanity  if  ancient  prophecy  and  our 
deepest,  most  spiritual  intuitions  have  any 
truth  in  them."  The  Young  Irishmen  in- 
tend to  let  Nature  have  her  way. 


42 


CHAPTER   ni 


And  now,  I  hear  the  impatient  reader 
saying,  what  about  Sir  Edward  Carson  ? 
You  have  written  a  great  deal  of  strange 
stuff  about  Sir  Horace  Plunkett  and  a 
fellow  called  Russell,  whose  name  is  totally 
imknown  to  me,  but  you  have  not  made  any 
reference  to  Sir  Edward  Carson,  "  our  great 
leader "  as  the  more  emotional  of  the 
Unionists  describe  him.  You  have  men- 
tioned Land  Purchase  Acts  and  Co-operation 
and  have  written  a  very  florid  panegyric  of 
a  group  of  youths  whom  you  name  the 
Young  Irishmen  ;  but  you  have  not  written 
one  word  about  the  man  whose  name  is  the 
title  of  your  book.  You  have  described  a 
great  ferment  of  ideas  in  Ireland,  the 
creation  of  a  new  synthesis,  a  shedding  of 
old,  unhappy,  far-off  things  and  a  reclothing 
in  something  fine  and  new.  Very  sketchily 
you  have  shown  that  there  is  a  great  revolu- 
tion proceeding  in  Ireland  of  which  very 
few  people  in  England  have  any  knowledge, 
and  I,  your  ignorant  and  impatient  reader, 
am  prepared  to  believe  that  this  revolu- 
tion   may    change   your   country  from    an 

43 


SIB   EDWARD    CARSON 


incoherent,  unorganised,  poverty  -  stricken 
nation  into  one  which  is  united  and  planned 
and  prosperous ;  and  I  am  prepared  to 
concede  considerable  credit  to  Sir  Horace 
Plunkett  and  that  other  fellow  "  ^,"  or 
whatever  his  name  may  be,  for  the  part 
they  have  taken  in  the  revolution ;  but, 
after  all,  Sir  Horace  Plunkett  is  only  Sir 
Horace  Plunkett,  a  name  unknown  to  the 
multitude,  whereas  the  name  of  Sir  Edward 
Carson  is  "as  familiar  in  our  mouths  as 
household  words."  What  part  did  he  take 
in  the  revolution  ?  What  has  he  done  to 
make  Ireland  a  prosperous  country  ?  .  .  . 


Nothing,  dear  impatient  reader,  abso- 
lutely nothing. 

3 

The  Right  Honourable  Sir  Edward  Henry 
Carson,  Privy  Councillor,  Master  of  Arts  of 
Trinity  College,  Dublin,  ll.d.  (Hon.  Causa), 
Member  of  Parliament  and  King's  Counsellor, 
the  leader  of  the  Ulster  Unionist  Movement 
and  the  starry  hero  of  all  the  politest  young 
ladies  of  Belfast,  has  not  done  anything  to 
promote  the  well-being  of  Ireland,  never  has 
done  anything  and  never  will. 

44 


AND    THE    ULSTER   MOVEMENT 


4 

"  But,"  the  English  reader  splutters  in 
astonishment,  "  the  man  must  have  done 
something !  Surely  to  Heaven  the  Ulster 
people,  whose  sanity  and  resom-ee  have 
always  been  notable,  did  not  deliberately 
seek  out  a  man  without  quality  and  choose 
him  to  be  their  leader ! "  You  must  let  me 
tell  the  story  in  my  own  way,  my  reader, 
but  for  your  impatience  I  will  tell  you  at 
once  that  that  is  precisely  what  the  Ulster 
people  did ;  and  they  did  it,  not  because 
they  had  suddenly  been  bereft  of  their 
sanity  and  resource,  but  because  they  were 
in  a  mood  of  rather  keener  sanity  and 
resource  than  usual. 


One  of  the  favourite  dicta  of  the  modern 
Irish  writers  is  that  the  stage  Irishman  has 
no  relation  to  Irish  life.  The  rather  ape- 
like creature,  clad  in  kneebreeches  and  a 
tailed-coat,  and  carrying  a  shillelagh  in  his 
hand,  who  is  so  familiar  to  the  readers  of 
Punch  and  the  patrons  of  the  music-hall  and 
the  melodrama  theatres,  has  no  existence  in 
Ireland,  the  modern  writers  say,  and  never 

45 


SIR   EDWARD    CARSON 


had  any  existence  there.  It  is  fashionable 
in  Dublin  to  sneer  at  the  novels  of  Charles 
Lever  and  Samuel  Lover  and  the  melodramas 
of  Dion  Boucieault  because  they  were  full 
of  such  people.  I  do  not  agree  with  my 
brothers  on  this  subject.  It  is  true  that  you 
do  not  see  Irishmen  in  kneebreeches  and 
tailed-coats  to-day.  It  is  true  that  Irish- 
men do  not  twirl  shillelaghs  over  their  heads 
and  dare  one  and  all  to  tread  on  the  tail  of 
their  coats.  (Some  of  them  do  not  even 
know  how  to  pronounce  the  word  "  shil- 
lelagh.") It  is  true,  too,  that  Irishmen  do 
not  now  address  one  as  "  a  broth  of  a  boy  '* 
nor  bid  the  passer-by  "  the  top  of  the 
morning,"  nor  do  any  of  the  things  which 
many  Englishmen  firmly  believe  they  do. 
But  there  must  have  been  Irishmen  who  did 
these  things  at  some  period  of  Irish  history^ 
and  the  proof  of  this  statement  lies  in  the 
fact  that  it  is  actually  possible  to  discover 
stage  Irishmen  in  real  life  to-day. 


46 


AND    THE    ULSTER   MOVEMENT 


6 

Sir  Edward  Carson  is  a  stage  Irishman. 
So  is  Lord  Charles  Beresford.  So  is  Mr. 
J.  G.  Swift  MacNeill.  (All  of  these  gentle- 
men are  Irish  Protestants  and,  with  the 
exception  of  Mr.  MacNeill,  Unionists.)  Sir 
Edward  Carson  is  the  last  of  the  Broths  of 
a  Boy.  He  has  a  touch  of  Samuel  Lover's 
"  Handy  Andy  "  in  him.  He  is  the  most 
notable  of  the  small  band  of  Bedadderers 
and  Be  jabberers  left  m  the  world  ;  the  final 
Comic  Irishman,  leaping  on  to  the  music- 
hall  stage  or  the  political  platform,  twirling 
a  blackthorn  stick  and  shouting  at  the  top 
of  a  thick,  broguey  voice  (carefully  pre- 
served and  cultivated  for  the  benefit  of 
English  audiences) :  "  Bedad,  bejabers  and 
begorra,  is  there  e'er  a  man  in  all  the  town 
dare  tread  on  the  tail  of  my  coat,  bedad, 
bejabers  and  begorra  !  "  No  other  Irishman 
speaks  with  so  dehberate  a  brogue  or  says 
"  What  "  so  obviously  "  Phwat !  "  No  one 
on  earth  is  so  clearly  the  "  typical  Irishman  " 
(that  is  to  say,  the  Irishman  of  the  muddy 
imagination)  as  Sir  Edward  Carson  is.  Goo' 
Dole  Charlie  Beresford  and  Mr.  Swift 
MacNeill  have  hardly  sufficient  flair  to  be 
described  in  the   admiring   way   in   which 

47 


SIR   EDWARD    CARSON 


I  have  just  described  Sir  Edward.  They 
are  minor  Broths  of  Boys.  They  would 
probably  be  more  noticeable  if  Sir  Edward 
were  not  present.  But  undoubtedly  they 
belong  to  the  tribe.  They,  too,  are  Be- 
dadderers  and  Bejabberers.  Lord  Charles 
Beresford,  in  a  very  dull,  formless  book  of 
reminiscences,  has  described  his  passage 
down  Park  Lane  on  the  back  of  a  pig  : 
which  is  precisely  the  sort  of  incident  that 
Charles  Lever  might  have  described  in 
"Charles  O'Malley "  or  "Tom  Burke  of 
'  Ours  '  "  or  "  Harry  Lorrequer,"  and  is 
exactly  the  kind  of  incident  that  nine 
Englishmen  out  of  ten  imagine  to  be  part 
of  the  common  routine  of  Irish  life. 

It  is  impossible  to  think  of  Sir  Horace 
Plunkett  riding  down  Park  Lane  on  the 
back  of  a  pig  :  it  is  equally  impossible  to 
think  of  Lord  Charles  Beresford  founding 
the  Irish  Agricultural  Organisation  Society. 
Lord  Charles,  in  fact,  has  founded  nothing 
but  a  reputation  for  flamboyant  and  rather 
fatuous  oratory.  He  is  the  kind  of  man  one 
might  like  to  have  for  one's  bachelor  uncle, 
the  sort  of  amiable,  mechanically  jocular  old 
gentleman  who  in  Early  Victorian  days  was 
generally  put  up  at  wedding  breakfasts  to 
propose  the  health  of  the  blushing  bride  and 
bridegroom,  a  feat  which  he  always  accom- 
plished with  sly  references  to  olive  branches 
and  the  like. 

48 


AND    THE    ULSTER    MOVEMENT 

Mr.  Swift  MacNeill  is  a  Learned  Bird.  He 
has  an  immense  store  of  footling  knowledge, 
and  is  inordinately  pleased  with  himself  for 
descending  from  Dean  Swift.  His  chief 
function  in  the  House  of  Commons  appears 
to  be  that  of  Yapper.  When  someone  makes 
a  disparaging  remark  about  Ireland,  Mr. 
MacNeill  shouts  out  "  Oh  !  oh  !  !  "  with 
something  of  the  passion  with  which  one 
ejaculates  when  impaled  upon  a  pin.  And 
there  his  services  to  Ireland  end.  His 
reward  will  probably  be  the  Speakership  of 
the  Irish  Parliament., 

Sir  Edward  Carson  easily  surpasses  these 
gentlemen  in  his  ability  to  fill  the  music- 
hall  stage  as  the  Comic  Irishman.  He  plays 
the  part  extraordinarily  well,  almost  con- 
vincing the  innocent  beholder  that  he  is  the 
real  Irishman,  all  others  being  aliens.  If  the 
reader  will  think  of  the  "  features  "  of  the 
stage  Irishman,  he  will  discover  that  Sir 
Edward  has  all  of  them.  He  is  quick- 
tempered, impulsive,  rash  in  his  speech, 
devil-may-care  in  his  manner  (up  to  a  point), 
obstinate  and  thoughtless.  As  the  common 
phrase  has  it,  "  he  speaks  without  thinking."  * 

*  A  friend  who  read  tbis  book  in  manuscript  niade  this  com- 
ment on  my  references  to  Sir  Edward  Carson  :  "  I  think  you  are 
a  little  hard  on  Carson  .  .  .  where  you  class  him  with  Beresford 
and  the  Bedadderers  and  Bejabberers.  He  is  not  an  attractive 
personality^  this  Carson,  but  he  has  a  kind  of  power  and  a 
character  of  his  own,  big  in  a  way  in  resistance  though  not  in 
creative  statesmanship.     He  has,  like  Pamell,  the  Irishman's 

D  49 


SIR   EDWARD    CARSON 


Now,  the  reader  may  demand,  if  you  are 
right  in  all  that  you  here  assert,  why  did  the 
sensible  men  of  Ulster  invite  this  Dublin 
playboy  to  lead  them  ?  There  is  nothing  in 
Sir  Edward's  character  that  in  any  way 
approximates  to  the  common  picture  of  the 
XJlster  character.  He  is  not  even  an  Ulster- 
man,  for  he  was  born  in  Galway  and  his 
associations  are  mainly,  so  far  as  Ireland  is 

faculty  of  doing  the  unexpected.     When  driven  into  a  corner 
the  unimaginative  Irishman  will  always  go  outside  the  conven 
tion^  and  Carson  did^  and  he  acted  so  far  as  I  have  read  his 

speeches,  with  rather  more  dignity  than  Dillon.    Miss ,  who 

is  a  very  shrewd  critic,  heard  him — I  never  did — and  said  he 
was  impressive  in  an  uninspiring  way,  rather  like  a  'decayed 
Pharaoh '  was  her  phrase."  I  willingly  concede  that  there  is  a 
powerful  negative  force  in  Sir  £dward  Carson's  character ; 
indeed,  I  will  go  further  and  add  that  if  I  had  to  choose  between 
Sir  £dward  and  Mr.  John  Redmond,  I  would  prefer  Sir  Edward 
to  be  my  leader.  He  has  force  of  some  sort,  and  even  a  certain 
dignity  of  utterance,  whereas  Mr.  Redmond  has  no  force  at  all^ 
but  is  merely  an  unimaginative  orator.  In  another  part  of  this 
book  I  have  stated  that  Sir  Edward  Carson  mad^  tentative  offers 
of  friendship  to  Mr.  Redmond  which  that  gentleman,  with  in- 
credible obtuseness,  did  not  accept;  and  for  that  reason,  as 
much  as  for  any  other.  Sir  Edward  comes  nearer  to  the  Young 
Irishman's  ideal  of  a  reconciler  than  Mr.  Redmond  does.  But 
when  that  admission  is  made,  there  is  still  a  large  area  of 
irritant  matter  in  Sir  Edward's  public  character  which  makes  it 
difficult  for  Young  Irishmen  to  have  any  sympathy  with  him. 
Irish  affairs  are  so  crude  that  the  pioneers  of  a  reconciled 
Ireland  must  spend  their  early  days  in  hacking  their  way 
through  growths  with  some  indifference.  When  paths  have 
been  made,  and  communications  have  been  established  in  safety 
between  North  and  South,  the  Young  Irishmen  will  take  note 
of  subtleties. 

50 


AND    THE    ULSTER   MOVEMENT 

concerned,  with  Dublin.  He  has  never 
lived  in  Ulster,  and,  to  one's  knowledge, 
he  has  no  kinsmen  there.  The  Englishman 
might  almost  be  pardoned  for  ascribing  the 
choice  of  Sir  Edward  as  leader  of  the  Ulster 
Unionists  to  the  general  topsy-turvyness  of 
Irish  life.  Apart  altogether  from  the  fact 
that  his  temperament  is  so  essentially  alien 
to  the  traditional  Ulster  temperament,  there 
is  the  further  fact  that  his  political  life  has 
been  a  wholly  undistinguished  one.  He  was 
Solicitor-General  for  Ireland  in  1892  and 
Solicitor-General  for  England  from  1900 
until  1906.  That  is  his  political  record  as 
an  officer  of  State.  His  name  cannot  be 
associated  with  any  measure  for  the  ameliora- 
tion of  Irish  or  British  life.  One  cannot  say 
of  him,  as  one  could  say  of  Mr.  Joseph 
Chamberlain,  that  he  has  done  things  which 
compel  the  respect  of  his  most  bitter  op- 
ponent. He  has  never  attempted,  probably 
never  even  thought  of,  improvements  for 
Dublin  or  Belfast  such  as  Mr.  Chamberlain 
achieved  for  Birmingham.  His  name  is  not 
linked  with  any  statute  of  well-being  as 
Mr.  Chamberlain's  name  is  linked  with  the 
Workmen's  Compensation  Act.  He  has 
never  shown  any  signs  of  having  such  a 
vision  as  filled  Mr.  Chamberlain's  mind  when 
he  proposed  to  forge  a  Tariff  bond  about 
the  British  Empire.  He  has  never  said  or 
done  anything  in  the  whole  of  his  political 

51 


k 


SIR   EDWARD    CARSON 


career  to  denote  that  he  possesses  any 
constructive  faculty  whatever.  His  success 
has  been  won  as  a  lawyer,  and  even  that  has 
been  won  before  juries  rather  than  before 
judges ;  and  the  beginnings  of  his  legal 
success  are  associated  in  the  minds  of  the 
overwhelming  majority  of  his  countrymen 
with  the  process  commonly  known  as  "  foul- 
ing one's  own  nest."  If  one  compares  Sir 
Edward  Carson's  life  with  that  of,  say,  Sir 
Horace  Plunkett,  one  sees  immediately  that 
it  is  an  empty  life.  V^Hiy,  then,  was  he 
chosen  to  be  the  leader  of  the  Ulster 
Unionists  ? 

8 

The  explanation,  to  anyone  who  knows 
Ulster,  is  very  plain.  Sir  Edward  Carson 
was  chosen  to  be  the  leader  of  the  Unionists 
in  Ulster  because  he  could  be  trusted  not  to 
go  too  far ;  for  his  character  as  the  final 
Comic  Irishman,  the  Bedadderer  and  Be- 
jabberer,  dominated  and  controlled  his 
character  as  a  man  of  impulse,  rash  and 
hot-tempered. 

9 

And  here  I  must  digress.  I  must  quit  the 
character  of  Sir  Edward,  for  a  section  or  two, 
and  deal  with  the  Ulstermen  themselves, 
and  with  their  opposition  to  Home  Rule, 

52 


AND    THE    ULSTER   MOVEMENT 

The  Ulsterman  is  opposed  to  jlome  Rule 
for  two  reasons.  He  dislikes  tTieTloman 
Catfiolic  church,  and  is  of  opinion  that 
Home  Rule,  as  the  late  Duke  of  Abercorn 
phrased  it,  means  Rome  Rule.  His  second 
ground  of  opposition  to  Home  Rule  lies  in 
his  contempt  for  the  business  capacity  of 
the  average  Nationalist :  he  fears  that  they 
will  so  misrule  Ireland  that  the  cost  of  govern- 
ment will  increase  inordinately  and  that  he 
and  his  kinsmen  will  find  the  incidence  of 
taxation  so  arranged  by  the  Catholic  majority 
that  Ulster  will  have  to  bear  the  heaviest 
part  of  it.  I  am  not  now  concerned  with  the 
truth  or  falsity  of  these  beliefs.  I  merely 
state  that  they  are  held,  and  sincerely  held, 
by  the  mass  of  the  Ulster  Protestants.  The 
fear  of  Catholicism  is,  of  course,  the  stronger 
of  the  two.  I  have  met  Belfastmen  who 
have  said  to  me  that  they  would  become 
Home  Rulers  were  it  not  for  the  Catholic 
Church.  Those  two  objections  to  Home 
Rule  are  the  beginning  and  the  end  of 
the  Ulster  Protestant  opposition  to  Irish 
autonomy.  If  any  man  tells  the  reader  that 
the  Ulstermen  are  afraid  of  their  Catholic 
countrymen  in  a  physical  sense  or  in  a 
business  sense,  that  man  is  a  liar.  The 
Ulsterman  is  not  physically  afraid  of  any 
living  man,  and  his  business  inctinct  is  so 
keen  that  he  can  make  a  good  livelihood 
where  other  men  would  starve. 

53 


SIR   EDWARD    CARSON 


Now  one  of  the  things  which  is  most 
firmly  settled  in  the  skull  of  every  Irishman, 
Protestant  or  Catholic,  is  the  beUef  that 
EngHshmen  can  be  scared  into  doing  things 
which  no  amount  of  argument  or  persuasion 
would  induce  them  to  do.  Irishmen  point 
out  that  the  Fenian  outrages  at  Clerkenwell 
Prison  had  the  effect  of  causing  Mr.  Glad- 
stone to  change  his  mind  completely  about 
Home  Rule ;  and  Irish  political  history  is 
full  of  examples  of  the  ease  with  which 
Irishmen  have  bullied  Englishmen. 


10 

Consider,  then,  the  plight  of  the  Ulster 
Unionists.  They  strongly  objected  to  the 
passage  of  the  Home  Rule  Bill,  but  they 
were  very  much  afraid  that  it  would  be 
passed  by  Mr.  Asquith's  Government.  The 
times  had  changed  since  the  days  when 
Mr.  Gladstone's  measures  were  before  the 
House  of  Commons.  English  opinion,  on  the 
whole,  was  favom*able  towards  Home  Rule. 
Sir  Edward  Carson  openly  lamented  over 
the  indifference  of  the  English  electorate 
when  he  pleaded  with  it.  The  cause  of  this 
change,  apart  altogether  from  the  justice 
and  desirability  of  Home  Rule,  was  that  the 
gift  of  self-government  to  the  Boers  had  been 
remarkably  successful,  and  Englishmen  could 

54 


AND    THE    ULSTER   MOVEMENT 

not  help  thinking  that  it  was  unfair  to  grant 
Home  Rule  to  men  who  were  recently  their 
enemies- and  withhold  it  from  men  who  had 
helped  to  conquer  those  enemies.  The 
ignominious  failure  of  De  Wet's  rebellion  at 
the  beginning  of  the  European  Disaster  was 
the  most  emphatic  confirmation  any  man 
could  desire  of  the  wisdom  of  conceding 
self-government  to  a  subject  people,  fl 
General  Botha  had  been  in  the  position  that 
Mr.  John  Redmond  was  until  the  passage 
of  the  Home  Rule  Bill,  will  anyone  deny 
that  Colonel  Maritz  would  almost  certainly 
have  raised  the  entire  Boer  population 
against  British  rule  in  South  Africa,  and  that 
they  and  the  Germans  would  have  caused 
serious  suffering  to  the  British  people  in  that 
land,  even  if  they  had  not  expelled  them 
from  it  ?  This  proof  of  the  wisdom  of  Home 
Rule  was  not  furnished  imtil  the  War  began, 
but  the  sense  of  unfair  dealing  with  the 
Irish  people  was  active  in  the  minds  of  the 
English  people,  and  it  swelled  almost  to  the 
point  of  danger  to  the  English  comity  when 
the  notorious  Curragh  Camp  mutiny  took 
place.  At  that  moment,  had  the  Liberals 
chosen  to  seek  re-election,  there  would  not 
have  been  a  single  Conservative  Member  of 
Parliament  left  in  the  North  of  England. 

But  the  Ulster  Unionists  had  to  face,  not 
only  the  indifference  of  the  English  elector- 
ate, but  also  the  indifference  of  the  young 

55 


SIR   EDWARD    CARSON 


men  of  Ulster.  They  had  even  to  face  the 
fact  that  many  young  men  of  abihty  were 
actually  in  favour  of  Home  Rule.  It  was 
very  noticeable  that  the  leaders  of  the  Anti- 
Home  Rule  campaign  were  mainly  old  men, 
so  old,  indeed,  that  it  did  not  seem  quite 
natural  for  some  of  them  to  be  still  alive. 
The  young  men  of  Ulster,  on  the  whole,  were 
not  prepared  to  die  in  any  ditch,  first  or  last, 
in  order  to  prevent  the  enactment  of  the 
Home  Rule  Bill,  and  a  reputable  number  of 
them  were  positively  prepared  to  fight  for 
its  passage.  It  is  to  be  regretted  that  the 
Old  Men  of  Ulster  acted  ignobly  to  some  of 
these  young  men.  Intimidation,  ranging 
from  threats  of  social  ostracism  to  threats 
of  dismissal  from  employment,  was  used  to 
induce  them  to  sign  the  Covenant  or  join 
the  Ulster  Volunteers.  There  was  talk  of 
boycotting  all  Protestant  Home  Rulers,  and 
there  was  an  outburst  of  personal  ill-will 
among  men  who  had  previously  been  on 
friendly  terms.  And  there  were  shameful 
scenes  of  violence  in  the  shipyards,  where 
gangs  of  infuriated  Orange  louts  attacked 
isolated  Catholics  or  Protestant  Home  Rulers 
and  subjected  them  to  acts  of  outrage  and 
brutality  which  cannot  be  fitly  described. 
The  Old  Men  of  Ulster  had  plenty  of  rebuke 
to  offer  to  some  Nationalist  ruffians  who 
interfered  with  a  Sunday-school  procession 
in  a  little  country  town,  but  they  had  not 

56 


AND    THE    ULSTER   MOVEMENT 

one  word  of  rebuke  to  offer  to  the  hooligans 
of  their  own  side  in  the  shipyards.  Never- 
theless, the  Old  Men  did  not  succeed  in 
terroj-ising  the  young  men,  and  since  that 
is  so,  and  failure  is  always  pitiable  even 
when  success  would  have  been  contemptible, 
we  need  not  lay  too  great  stress  on  the  cruel- 
ties and  tyrannies  that  were  enacted  by  the 
Old  Men  in  the  days  when  their  hearts  were 
most  bitter  and  their  rages  most  fierce  ;  for 
Time  passes  and,  thank  God,  takes  Old  Men 
with  it. 

There  was  an  additional  factor  in  the 
problem.  It  was  this,  that  none  of  the 
business  men  of  Ulster,  old  or  young,  with 
the  possible  exception  of  Captain  Craig,  had 
any  taste  for  rebellion.  They  certainly  had 
not  the  appetite  for  insurrection  that  their 
fathers  had  in  1798.  Rebellions  are  uncer- 
tain things  :  they  may  succeed  and  they 
may  fail.  The  business  men  knew  that  a 
rebellion,  whether  it  failed  or  succeeded, 
would  certainly  ruin  them.  Ruin  and  death 
are  incidents  in  the  career  of  men  who  are 
set  on  their  purpose,  and  had  the  Anti-Home 
Rule  Movement  had  behind  it  the  passion 
that  the  Balkan  peoples  must  have  felt 
against  the  Turks  when  they  rose  against 
them  in  the  last  Balkan  wars,  none  of  its 
leaders  would  have  flinched  from  poverty 
or  death.  But  if  a  man  is  to  be  ruined  or 
killed,  he  wishes  at  least  to  be  certain  that 

57 


SIB   EDWARD   CARSON 


his  ruin  or  death  are  caused  by  a  great 
matter.  The  North  Americans  must  have 
had  some  feehng  of  exaltation  in  the  Civil 
War  when  they  reflected  that  by  their  death 
or  ruin  they  were  helping  to  make  freedom 
more  secure.  But  a  paltry  little  brawl  about 
the  Pope  and  King  William,  a  mean  squabble 
about  the  site  of  government — who  could 
feel  any  exaltation  in  such  a  fight  as  that — 
who  could  willingly,  gladly  face  ruin  and 
destruction  for  that  sake  ? 

The  Old  Men  of  Ulster  had  no  stomach 
for  an  empty  rebellion.  I  iiAagine  that  their 
mental  attitude  towards  the  Bill  was  that 
they  would  be  very  glad  to  prevent  its 
passage  into  law,  that  they  would  take 
every  conceivable  step  in  order  to  prevent  its 
passage  into  law,  but  that,  should  they  fail 
to  do  so,  they  would  make  the  best  of  a  bad 
job.  That  mental  attitude  was  never  openly 
expressed  in  words,  and  not  very  often 
privately  expressed  in  words ;  but  it  was, 
I  think,  a  general  mental  attitude.  When 
men  are  most  in  despair  of  victory,  they 
are  often  most  assertive  of  their  confidence 
of  winning ;  and  although  the  Old  Men  of 
Ulster  protested  (and  still  protest,  those  of 
them  that  are  left)  that  the  Home  Rule  Bill 
would  never  become  law  or,  if  it  did,  that 
they  would  never  submit  to  the  jurisdiction 
of  a  Dublin  Parliament,  I  do  not  doubt  that 
in  their  hearts  they  were  aware  that  the  Bill 

58 


AND    THE    ULSTER   MOVEMENT 

would  pass  and  were  already  scheming  in 
their  minds  for  a  way  of  making  Ulstermen 
dominant  in  the  new  legislatm-e.  (The 
Ulstermen  will,  of  course,  speedily  win  con- 
trol of  the  parliament,  for  it  is  the  habit  of 
Ulstermen  to  dominate  any  society  in  which 
they  may  find  themselves.  God  did  not 
make  them  Ulstermen  for  nothing.) 

What,  then,  was  to  be  done  ?  Obviously, 
the  only  thing  to  do  was  to  try  once  more 
the  old  game  of  scaring  the  Englishman  out 
of  his  wits. 

But  the  thing  had  to  be  done  carefully. 
It  was  vital  to  the  welfare  of  Ulster  that  the 
process  of  scaring  the  Englishman  out  of  his 
wits  should  not  be  allowed  to  develop  into 
a  real,  red  terror.  The  Ulster  Protestant 
man  in  the  street  resembles  all  other  men  in 
the  street :  he  is  simpler  and  more  sincere 
than  his  leaders  ;  and  it  would  have  been 
very  easy  for  the  masters  of  Sir  Edward 
Carson  to  have  created  a  bloody  revolution 
in  Ireland  had  they  chosen  to  make  one. 
Bloody  revolutions,  however,  are  expensive 
and  incalculable  things,  likely  at  any  moment 
to  end  in  the  violent  death  of  those  who 
begin  them ;  and  so  the  masters  of  Sir 
Edward  Carson  were  resolved  to  take  as  few 
risks  of  causing  a  real  rebellion  as  possible. 
There  was,  all  the  time,  a  possibility  that 
blood  would  be  spilled  in  Belfast,  and  the 
great  labour  of  the  leaders  was  to  make  that 

59 


SIR   EDWARD    CARSON 


possibility  as  slender  as  they  could.  Their 
problem,  therefore,  became  twofold :  on 
the  one  hand,  they  had  to  scare  the  English 
people,  and  on  the  other  hand,  they  had  to 
control  their  own  people.  They  found  a 
solution  of  the  problem  which  was  extremely 
ingenious  and  economical,  and  might  in  all 
human  probability  have  been  successful, 
had  it  not  been  for  one  thing  which  was 
beyond  the  ken  of  men.  They  formed  the 
Ulster  Volunteer  Corps.  There  was  to  be  a 
gigantic  appearance  of  armed  men  and  stiff- 
lipped  rebels  ;  there  was  to  be  drilling  and 
signaUing  and  gun-running  and  a  huge  alarm 
of  military  movements.  In  a  very  short 
time  Ulster  became  like  a  camp.  Motor- 
cyclists carried  dispatches  from  one  officer 
to  another.  ("  Why  the  hell  haven't  you 
sent  back  that  pouch  of  tobacco  I  lent  you 
last  Tuesday  !  ")  Heliographers  perched 
themselves  on  high  places  and  sent  the  sun's 
rays  shimmering  into  all  sorts  of  corners. 
Young  fellows,  always  willing  to  seize  an 
opportunity  of  improving  their  material 
condition,  volunteered  to  act  as  wireless 
telegraphists  and  were  taught  the  mysteries 
of  Signor  Marconi's  discovery  free  of  all 
expense  to  themselves.  The  young  ladies 
took  to  nursing  and  were  frequently  photo- 
graphed in  their  pretty  uniforms.  The 
elderly  ladies  were  photographed  almost  as 
often.    And  then,  when  the  organisation  had 


AND    THE    ULSTER   MOVEMENT 

been  shaped  to  a  satisfactory  mould,  a 
number  of  English  journalists  were  carefully 
conducted  through  the  province  and  invited 
to  describe  the  horrors  of  civil  war  in  their 
newspapers.  English  dukes  and  bodies  of 
working  men,  judiciously  selected  from  "  all 
parties,"  were  taken  round  Belfast  and  other 
cities  by  "  dry  nurses,"  so  that  they  might 
see  how  wonderfully  superior  the  Protestant 
is  to  the  Catholic.  The  whole  thing  was  to 
be  very  jolly.  The  Ulster  Catholics,  who 
enjoy  the  game  of  pulling  the  Englishman's 
leg  as  heartily  as  do  the  Ulster  Protestants, 
entered  into  the  spirit  of  the  thing,  and  they, 
too,  helped  to  make  a  picture  of  dread  for 
the  purpose^  of  scarifying  the  English.  All 
this  was  easy  enough  to  arrange.  The  im- 
portant thin^  was  that  it  should  not  be 
allowed  to  become  a  serious  affair  to  the 
Ulster  men  themselves.  It  could  only  be 
prevented  from  becoming  a  disaster  to 
Ulster  by  rigidly  refusing  to  allow  any 
Ulsterman  to  be  leader  of  the  Ulster  Move- 
ment 

11 

If  an  Ulsterman  had  led  the  Ulster 
Unionist  Movement  he  would  inevitably 
have  turned  the  thing  into  a  reality.  There 
were  hundreds  of  Ulstermen  burning  with 
fierce  passion  against  Home  Rule,  any  one 

61 


SIR   EDWARD    CARSON 


of  whom  could  have  created  a  real  rebellion 
in  ten  minutes  had  the  rest  of  the  Ulstermen 
put  him  into  the  position  to  make  it.  It 
was  a  hard  job  to  restrain  some  of  these 
fellows,  many  of  whom  were  ministers  of 
religion.  Every  now  and  then  one  of  them 
would  break  out  with  a  threat  to  kick  King 
George's  crown  into  the  Boyne  if  His 
Majesty  should  dare  to  sign  the  Home  Rule 
Bill,  and  a  Member  of  Parliament,  with  tears 
in  his  voice,  informed  an  audience  that  he 
would  never,  never,  never  again  sing  the 
National  Anthem  if  the  Bill  were  passed. 
One  can  scarcely  imagine  what  Ijirid  threats 
against  the  King  were  uttered  m  the  little 
back  streets  by  Sandy  Row  and  the  Shankill 
Road.  The  astute  old  men  who  organised 
the  Ulster  Movement  were  in  no  mind  to  run 
the  risk  of  being  landed  in  a  mess  of  blood 
and  battered  bodies ;  so  they  resolutely 
inhibited  any  Ulsterman  from  leadership. 
If  they  had  wished  to  have  a  rebellion  such 
as  their  forefathers  had  wished  to  have 
when  England  was  embarrassed  by  the 
American  War  of  Independence,  they  would 
not  have  sent  for  Sir  Edward  Carson :  th'^y 
would  have  sent  for  Sir  Roger  Casement. 
Sir  Edward  Carson  lunched  with  the  Kaiser 
a  month  or  two  before  the  European  Disaster 
began ;  and  his  followers  openly  bragged 
of  the  fact  that  a  powerful  foreign  monarch, 
whose  name  began  with  a  "  W,"  had  offered 

62 


AND    THE    ULSTER   MOVEMENT 

to  help  Ulster  in  the  event  of  the  Home  Rule 
Bill  becoming  law.  Ulster  Unionist  Mem- 
bers of  Parliament  actually  made  speeches 
in  which  they  dedared  that  they  would 
much  rather  be  ruled  by  the  Kaiser  than  by 
Mr.  Redmond ;  and  a  number  of  innocent 
German  joiu-nalists  and  officers  came  to 
Ulster  on  purpose  to  see  the  rebellion  begin. 
.  .  .  But  there  was  no  meaning  in  that 
luncheon,  so  far  as  Sir  Edward  Carson  was 
concerned.  If  the  Kaiser  really  offered  to 
help  Sir  Edward  to  resist  Home  Rule,  I  am 
certain  that  Sir  Edward  winked  the  other 
eye.  He  had  no  earthly  intention  of  allow- 
ing the  Kaiser  or  any  foreign  monarch  to 
land  troops  in  Ulster  or  anywhere  else,  and 
those  party-blinded  men  who  go  about  darkly 
suggesting  that  Sir  Edward  should  be  hanged 
for  high  treason  are  fools.  It  is  not  Dublin 
playboys  who  make  rebellions  :  it  is  Ulster- 
men  who  make  them.  When  the  European 
Disaster  happened,  it  was  not  Sir  Edward 
Carson  who  instantly  set  off  to  Berlin  with 
an  offer  of  service  to  the  Kaiser  :  it  was  Sir 
Roger  Casement.  Sir  Edward  Carson  closed 
his  mouth  on  the  first  moment  that  real  guns 
began  to  go  off,  and  he  has  not  opened  it 
since,  nor  is  he  likely  to  open  it  until  all 
danger  of  real  guns  going  off  is  over.  But 
Sir  Roger  Casement,  the  Ulsterman,  bom 
in  County  Antrim,  a  Protestant  from  one 
of  the  precious  coimties  of  the  "  north-east 

68 


SIR   EDWARD    CARSON 


-corner,"  bolted  to  Berlin  with  the  utmost 
celerity. 

12 

The  Ulstermen  knew  that  they  could  not 
hope  to  prevent  the  Ulster  Movement  from 
culminating  in  a  tragedy  if  they  permitted 
an  Ulsterman  to  be  their  leader.  So  they 
sent  for  the  Dublin  playboy,  the  final 
Comic  Irishman,  Sir  Edward  Carson,  and 
bade  him  to  be  their  leader.  They  hired  a 
superannuated  general  from  Pinner,  named 
Richardson,  and  made  him  Commander-in- 
Chief  of  the  Ulster  Volunteers,  an  appoint- 
ment which  tickled  The  Times  so  much  that 
it  printed  General  Richardson's  title  in  in- 
verted commas  as  if  he  were  "  General " 
Booth.  If  the  Ulstermen  had  wanted  a  real 
general  for  a  real  rebellion,  they  would  have 
given  the  command  to  Captain  Craig,  a 
genial  distiller  who  served  in  South  Africa 
and  would  fight  Nationalists  with  almost 
^eater  avidity  than  he  would  fight  Germans. 
Captain  Craig  was  debarred  from  the  com- 
mand because  he  is  an  Ulsterman  and  there- 
fore a  man  of  unique  sincerity.  If  the  leaders 
of  the  Movement  had  thought  it  worth  while 
to  organise  a  fleet  of  ferry-boats  on  Lough 
Neagh  or  in  Belfast  Lough,  they  would  cer- 
1:ainly  have  given  the  command  of  it  to  Goo' 
Dole  Charlie  Beresford.    They  did  not,  how- 

64 


AND    THE    ULSTER   MOVEMENT 

ever,  consider  this  necessary.  Perhaps  they 
thought  that  one  Comic  Irishman  was  enough 
at  a  time.  Having  appointed  Sir  Edward 
Carson  and  "  General  "  Richardson  to  their 
posts,  the  Ulstermen  next  let  loose  on  the 
province  a  lot  of  tame  Tory  Members  of 
Parliament  and  told  them  to  be  as  fierce 
and  spluttery  as  they  could.  They  even  im- 
ported Mr.  Frederick  Edwin  Smith,*  the 
celebrated  comedian,  and  made  a  Galloper 
of  him  because,  as  one  of  them  subsequently 
said  to  me  in  private,  they  needed  some  light 
relief  in  the  programme.  Then  there  was  a 
great  to-do,  a  beating  of  drums  and  tootling 
of  trumpets,  and  much  oratory  and  Press 
sensation.  A  Provisional  Government,  in- 
nocent of  any  working-man  member,  was 
established.  Lord  Northcliffe  became  ex- 
cited, as  is  his  habit,  and  sent  a  cargo  of 
young  gentlemen  from  The  Daily  Mail  over 
to  Belfast  to  act  as  war  correspondents. 
The  miserable  Kaiser,  having  been  gulled  by 
Sir  Edward  as  effectively  as  Lord  North- 
cliffe had  been,  sent  over  some  correspon- 

*  Since  the  above  was  written,  a  Coalition  Government  has 
been  formed  in  England,  and  Mr.  Smith  has  been  appointed 
Solicitor-General.  He  has  also  been  given  a  title.  Moreover, 
the  humble  Galloper  of  the  Ulster  Volunteer  Force  has  been 
promoted  to  be  a  Lieutenant-Colonel  in  the  Regular  Army. 
This  rapid  promotion^  which  has  utterly  astounded  military 
officers  who  are  not  lawyers,  is  no  doubt  the  reward  due  to 
some  piece  of  gallantry  performed  on  the  battlefield  by  Sir 
Frederick  which  has,  unaccountably,  escaped  the  notice  of 
the  newspapers. 

E  65 


SIR   EDWARD    CARSON 


dents  from  Germany.  All  was  ready.  The 
army  was  driUing,  the  orators  were  orating, 
Mr.  F.  E.  Smith  was  galloping,  Goo'  Dole 
Charlie  Beresford  was  writing  his  reminis^ 
cences,  the  ladies  were  waiting  for  the 
wounded  with  bandages  and  lint,  the  helio- 
graphers  were  tinkering  with  the  sim,  the 
cinematograph  operators  had  obtained  the 
focus,  and  the  Pressmen  had  their  notebooks 
out  and  their  pencils  sharpened.  All  was 
ready.  The  army  was  to  march  roimd  the 
walls  of  Jericho  seven  times  and  then  let  a 
great  shout  out  of  it,  when  the  walls  of  Jericho 
would  obligingly  fall  down  :  the  English 
people,  completely  and  utterly  scared  out 
of  their  wits,  would  refuse  to  allow  the  Home 
Rule  Bill  to  be  passed.  ... 

13 

And  then  the  Great  War  broke  out,  and 
the  Ulster  Movement  collapsed.  Sir  Edward 
Carson  did  not  rush  on  to  the  battlefield  : 
he  rushed  into  church  and  got  married.  ... 

14 

But  apart  from  the  diversion  caused  by 
the  Disaster,  the  leaders  of  the  Movement 
had  seen  signs  that  the  English  people  were 
not  in  the  least  scared  by  all  this  parapher- 
nalia of  war.     They  were,  in  fact,  totally 

66 


AND    THE    ULSTER    MOVEMENT 

indifferent  to  the  Ulster  Volunteers.  It  is 
conceivable  that  some  of  the  astute  old  men 
who  made  the  Movement  (most  of  them  are 
now  dead)  were  almost  thankful  that  the 
European  Disaster  prevented  all  possibility 
of  an  Irish  Disaster.  One  salutes  them  in 
their  graves  because  they  had  the  Ulster 
force  even  when  they  were  in  the  wrong ; 
one  realises  that  they  must  have  been 
grievously  pained  when  they  noticed  how 
indifferent  the  Young  Ulstermen  were  to 
the  perils  and  dangers  of  Home  Rule,  how 
keen,  indeed,  some  of  the  Young  Men  were 
that  Ireland  should  be  self-governing ;  but 
one  turns  from  their  tombs  very  gladly  in 
the  sure  and  certain  hope  that  the  chemicals 
of  time  will  dissolve  all  the  harsh  hatreds 
that  have  separated  Irishmen  and  made 
their  land  a  house  of  brawling  brothers. 
"  The  time  God  allots  to  each  one  of  us  is 
like  a  precious  tissue  which  we  embroider 
as  we  best  know  how,"  wrote  Sylvestre 
Bonnard  in  M.  Anatole  France's  charming 
story,  and  perhaps  it  was  inevitable  that 
those  old  men  of  Ulster  should  embroider 
a  displeasing  design  on  the  tissue  that  God 
had  given  them,  a  design  full  of  discord  and 
sharp  angles  ;  but  we  who  follow  them  will 
not  continue  to  work  after  their  pattern. 
We  have  finer  designs  to  fashion. 


67 


CHAPTER   IV 


The  reader  may  now  demand  what  is  to  be 
the  end  of  all  this  pother.  There  are  two 
armies  in  Ireland,  one  controlled  by  the 
Unionists  and  the  other  by  the  Nationalists. 
The  first  army  is  well  organised,  well  armed, 
and  well  drilled  :  the  second,  for  a  variety 
of  reasons,  mainly  connected  with  finance 
and  the  fact  that  it  has  been  in  existence 
a  shorter  time  than  the  Ulster  army,  is  less 
well  organised,  poorly  armed,  and  not  very 
well  drilled.  The  material  of  both  armies  is 
magnificent :  the  men,  for  they  are  Irish, 
are  the  finest  in  the  world.  Are  these  men, 
when  the  War  is  over,  to  set  themselves 
again  to  the  bitterness  of  civil  strife  ? 

The  factors  in  the  situation  are  very 
diverse,  and  there  are  inflammatory  elements 
in  them  which  might,  by  themselves,  set  the 
establishment  on  fire ;  but  when  all  the 
factors  are  considered,  the  reader  will  see 
that  there  is  a  very  strong  probability  that 
the  inflammatory  elements  will  be  made 
harmless.  It  is  true  that  there  is  still  a 
great  deal  of  bitterness  in  Ireland  on  the 
Home  Rule   question :    the   War  has  not 

68 


THE    ULSTER   MOVEMENT 

obliterated  the  ancient  lines  of  demarcation, 
and  the  little  politicians  still  mumble  darkly 
of  what  they  will  do  when  peace  comes 
again.  One  incredulously  reads  ungenerous 
comparisons  drawn  between  the  two  classes 
of  Irishmen  by  party  hacks  until,  almost, 
one  imagines  that  these  witless  men  believe 
that  the  War  was  begun  in  order  to  provide 
them  with  political  party  arguments.  If 
the  fate  of  Ireland  were  left  in  the  hands  of 
the  little  politicians,  it  would,  indeed,  be 
desperate ;  but  the  spleen  which  lies  in  the 
little  politicians'  beastly  insides  is,  fortu- 
nately, less  strong  than  the  spirit  of  goodwill 
which  biu-ns  in  the  hearts  of  the  Young 
Irishmen  ;  and  so  it  is  likely  in  the  end  that 
the  little  politicians  will  perish. 

But  there  are  strong  factors  to  be  coimted 
in  support  of  the  Young  Irishmen,  which  I 
will  now  enumerate. 


The  first  is  the  European  Disaster.  No 
one  can  say  how  far  the  War  will  act  as  a 
solvent  of  Irish  problems,  but  it  is  very 
improbable  that  those  of  the  Volunteers, 
Ulster  and  Nationalist,  who  have  enlisted 
for  foreign  service  and  have  fought  together 
in  France  and  Flanders  will  willingly  consent 
to  take  up  arms  against  each  other  in 
Ireland  ;   and  it  is  certain  that,  if  they  were 

69 


SIR   EDWARD   CARSON 


so  disposed,  the  English  people,  sickened  of 
blood  and  battle,  would  not  permit  them 
to  fight. 

The  reaction  from  the  destruction  of  the 
Disaster  may  or  may  not  act  after  the 
fashion  of  the  great  vapour  in  Mr.  H.  G. 
Wells's  story,  "  In  the  Days  of  the  Comet  "  ; 
that  is  an  element  on  which  no  one  can 
calculate.  But  there  are  other  elements  in 
this  Irish  problem  which  are  calculable,  and 
these,  fortunately,  are  likely  to  operate 
pacifically.  I  stated  in  the  previous  chapter 
that  the  Ulster  Unionist  Movement  was 
mainly  engineered  by  old  men,  and  I  added 
that  most  of  the  young  men  of  affairs  were 
either  indifferent  to  Home  Rule  or  actually 
in  favour  of  it.  That  is,  perhaps,  the  most 
important  of  all  the  factors  in  the  situation. 
One  runs  over  in  one's  mind  the  names  of  all 
the  men  who  were  behind  the  scenes  in 
Belfast,  and  is  startled  to  discover  how  many 
of  them  have  died  since  the  Provisional 
Government  was  established.  During  the 
year  1914,  there  was  something  like  an 
epidemic  of  deaths  among  the  old  men  who 
were  the  real  leaders  of  the  Movement.  They 
were  men  of  very  great  ability  and  courage 
and  resource,  and  could,  had  their  minds 
not  have  been  cramped  by  their  objections 
to  Home  Rule,  have  served  Ireland  magnifi- 
cently. It  is  odd  now  to  reflect  that  they 
could  not  be  persuaded  to  behave  in  the 

70 


AND    THE    ULSTER   MOVEMENT 

larger  sphere  of  national  life  as  they  behaved 
in  the  smaller  sphere  of  co-operative  enter- 
prise. Such  a  man  as  the  late  Right  Honour- 
able Thomas  Sinclair,  a  man  of  singular 
integrity  and  judgment,  had  no  difficulty 
whatever  in  working  with  Nationalists  and 
Catholics  on  committees  of  the  Irish  Agri- 
cultural Organisation  Society ;  but  some 
perverse  thing  operating  in  his  mind  made 
him  refuse  to  work  with  them  in  government. 
There  were  many  men  in  Belfast  such  as  he 
who  had  all  the  potentialities  of  great  Irish- 
men, but,  because  of  traditional  prejudices 
and  hatreds,  persisted  in  being  only  little 
Ulstermen. 

The  most  vital  of  them  are  dead ;  and 
there  is  a  gap  now  in  Irish  life.  The  young 
men,  tentatively  feeling  their  way  to  power, 
have  not  yet  become  sufficiently  influential 
to  take  their  place ;  but  undoubtedly  the 
young  men  will  find  their  way  to  power. 
It  is  on  that  likelihood  that  the  hope  of  Irish 
unity  rests. 

A  third  factor,  much  less  important  than 
the  two  already  stated,  is  connected  with 
the  finance  of  the  Movement.  It  is  in- 
disputable that  a  great  deal  of  money  was 
donated  to  the  Ulster  Movement  by  English 
Conservatives  whose  anxiety  was,  not  so 
much  to  prevent  the  enactment  of  Home 
Rule,  as  to  dislodge  the  Liberal  Government 
from    power.      Mr.    Lloyd    George's    Land 

71 


SIR   EDWARD    CARSON 


Legislation,  actual  and  proposed,  together 
with  the  increase  in  the  Death  Duties  and 
the  change  in  the  incidence  of  the  Income 
Tax  caused  by  the  introduction  of  the  Super 
Tax  considerably  alarmed  the  classes  who 
live  on  rent  and  interest.  I  remember  asking 
the  editor  of  a  Conservative  newspaper  why 
his  journal  was  so  devoted  to  the  Orangemen, 
and  he  informed  me  that  his  interest  was  due 
to  the  fact  that  all  the  rich  people  were  on 
the  side  of  the  Orangemen,  whom  he  person- 
ally disliked.  The  prospect  of  civil  war  in 
Ireland  was  sufficiently  alarming  to  the 
electorate  in  England  to  cause  a  strong 
revulsion  of  feeling  against  the  Liberals ; 
and,  in  their  own  interests,  the  moneyed 
classes  in  England  took  considerable  pains 
and  incurred  considerable  expense  in  order 
to  enlarge  that  prospect.  It  was  not  love  of 
the  Orangeman  that  caused  the  Duke  of 
This  and  My  Lady  That  to  exert  themselves 
so  mightily  in  behalf  of  the  Union  :  it  was 
the  simpler  desire  to  be  delivered  from  the 
burden  of  contributing  any  more  money  to 
the  cost  of  maintaining  their  country  than 
they  could  help. 

The  War  has  made  it  very  difficult  for 
these  ladies  and  gentlemen  to  continue  to 
contribute  to  the  war-chest  of  the  Ulster 
Movement.  Fortunes  have  been  diminished 
or  made  unstable ;  the  income  tax  is  likely 
to  reach  a  high  figure ;  and  for  a  generation 

72 


AND    THE    ULSTER   MOVEMENT 

or  two,  most  of  us  will  feel  strongly  the 
necessity  of  retrenching  our  expenditure. 
Many  large  estates  have  been  seriously 
embarrassed  because  Death  Duties  have  had 
to  be  paid  on  them  twice  and  sometimes 
oftener  in  quick  succession ;  and  here  and 
there  one  hears  hints  that  some  of  them  will 
have  to  be  broken  up.  The  War,  too,  may 
bring  in  its  trail  a  great  deal  of  poverty  and 
unemployment  (though  I  am  personally  of 
opinion  that  wise  statesmanship  can  obviate 
a  great  deal  of  such  distress  by  the  judicious 
discharge  of  troops  when  the  War  is  over 
and  the  raising  of  large  loans  to  accelerate 
employment  in  all  works  of  repair  made 
necessary  by  hostile  operations).  If  the 
contributions  to  the  Ulster  war-chest  have 
not  already  ceased  to  flow  in,  they  very 
speedily  will  do  so. 

I  do  not  suggest  that  the  sudden  cessation 
of  money  contributions  to  their  funds  will 
cause  Ulstermen  to  submit  to  Mr.  Redmond's 
government ;  for  the  opposition  of  the 
Ulstermen  to  Home  Rule  is  not  a  pur- 
chasable commodity  ;  but  I  do  suggest  that 
this  factor,  operating  with  the  other  factors 
I  have  named,  will  very  probably  cause  the 
armed  opposition  to  collapse  into  a  sullen 
resentment  which  may  manifest  itself  in 
sporadic  riots,  but  will,  given  intelligent 
government,  die  of  inanition. 


73 


SIR   EDWARD    CARSON 


I  have  used  the  word  "  submit  "  in  the 
last  paragraph,  and  I  now  make  a  fresh 
paragraph  in  order  that  I  may  more  em- 
phatically repudiate  the  idea  which  the 
word  connotes.  There  will  be  no  sub- 
mission on  the  part  of  any  section  of  the 
Irish  people  to  any  other  section.  The 
Ulster  Protestant  will  not  be  ruled  by  Mr. 
Redmond  in  the  way  in  which  a  vanquished 
people  are  ruled  by  their  conquerors.  There 
will  not  be  any  conquerors,  there  will  not  be 
any  vanquished  people.  When  King  George 
opens  his  Parliament  on  College  Green, 
Irishmen  will  be  celebrating,  not  the  victory 
of  Nationalists  over  Unionists,  Catholics 
over  Protestants,  but  the  reconciliation  for 
ever  of  all  Irishmen,  the  fusion  of  North  and 
South  into  the  solidity  of  a  nation. 


4 

But  apart  from  the  factors  I  have  set 
forth  in  the  preceding  sections  of  this 
chapter,  there  is  the  additional  factor  that 
the  Ulstermen  themselves  by  now  have 
begun  to  feel  that  there  is  an  element  of  the 
ridiculous  in  the  whole  Movement.  When 
Sir  Edward  Carson  first  said,  "I  will  die  in 

74 


AND   THE    ULSTER   MOVEMENT 

the  last  ditch  rather  than  submit  to  a  Home 
Rule  Government,"  he  was  probably  im- 
pressive. I  do  not  doubt  that  he  filled 
his  auditors  with  emotion  and  that  they 
resolved  that  they  would  accompany  him 
into  that  ditch.  But  when  he  had  said  the 
same  thing  for  the  three-hundred-and-fifty- 
ninth  time  without  even  getting  a  speck  of 
mud  on  his  clothes,  the  heroic  period  became 
a  catchword ;  and  young  lads  began  to 
make  appointments  to  meet  their  sweet- 
hearts in  the  last  ditch.  Some  of  them 
became  disrespectful  to  Sir  Edward  himself. 
They  muttered  to  themselves,  "  Aye,  you'll 
die  in  the  last  ditch  all  right,  but  you'll 
expect  us  to  die  in  the  first  one  !  "  The 
truth  of  the  scriptural  denunciation  of  "  vain 
repetitions "  was  once  more  exemplified. 
Sir  Edward's  passionate  exhortations  to 
implacable  resistance  invariably  ended  in 
his  moving  the  adjournment  of  the  death-in- 
the-last-ditch  to  the  following  session.  One 
got  the  sensation  in  listening  to  his  speeches 
that  at  any  moment  he  might  say,  "  Gentle- 
men of  the  jury !  "  instead  of  "  Men  of 
Ulster."  No  one  in  Ireland  (and  very  few 
out  of  it)  had  the  slightest  belief  in  the 
sincerity  of  Mr.  F.  E.  Smith.  There  was  a 
time  when  everyone  in  Ireland  believed  in 
the  sincerity  of  Sir  Edward  Carson.  The 
mass  of  Irishmen  still  believe  in  his  sincerity, 
but  there  is  a  feeling  of  wonder  in  the  minds 

75 


SIR   EDWARD    CARSON 


of  many  of  them  as  to  what  exactly  is  the 
thing  about  which  he  is  sincere.  But  the 
question  of  his  sincerity  is  neither  here  nor 
there.  What  is  of  consequence  is  that, 
whether  he  willed  it  or  not,  he  has  made 
rebellion  in  Ulster  impossible  by  postponing 
it  until  the  heart  was  taken  out  of  the  rebels. 
I  believe  that  the  wise  old  men  who  were 
behind  Sir  Edward  Carson,  when  they  saw 
how  indifferent  the  English  people  were  to 
their  alarms  and  excursions,  deliberately 
schemed  for  delay  and  postponement  in 
order  to  take  the  "  fizz  "  out  of  the  Move- 
ment. 


Ulster  may  be  sulky  at  first ;  Ulster  may 
refuse  to  send  representatives  to  the  Irish 
Parliament ;  there  may  even  be  a  show  of 
ruling  by  the  Provisional  Government,  and 
possibly  rioting  in  the  poorer  parts  of 
Belfast  and  Derry  and  Portadown  and 
other  towns  ;  but  in  the  end,  Ulster  will 
come  in.  Ulster  will  not  be  able  to  resist 
the  temptation  to  take  Irish  affairs  in 
control  and  teach  the  silly  Dubliners  how 
to  manage  their  business.  In  a  previous 
chapter,  I  stated  that  Dublin  has  a  cor- 
rupt municipal  body.  So  has  Belfast.  But 
the  difference  between  the  Corporation  of 
Belfast  and  the   Corporation  of  Dublin  is 

76 


AND    THE    ULSTER   MOVEMENT 

that  the  former  is  also  efficient  while  the 
latter  is  as  incompetent  as  it  can  be.  Belfast 
may  practise  duplicity  in  getting  its  work 
done,  but  it  gets  it  done.  What  Ireland 
needs  is,  not  Home  Rule,  but  Ulster  Rule ; 
and  when  Ulster  has  recovered  from  her 
sulks,  she  will  take  care  that  Ireland  gets  it. 


77 


CHAPTER    V 


I  HAVE  several  times  in  the  course  of  this 
book  made  reference  to  the  Young  Irishmen, 
and  the  reader  may  be  curious  to  know 
more  of  them.  There  is  no  organised  body 
of  Young  Irishmen ;  they  do  not  compose 
a  society  with  a  secretary  and  treasurer  and 
registered  ofl&ces  and  annual  meetings  and 
published  reports.  They  are  not  even  com- 
pletely aware  of  each  other,  nor  are  they,  as 
the  generic  title  I  have  given  to  them  may 
seem  to  denote,  all  of  one  sex.  The  Young 
Irishmen  are,  indeed,  an  idea  rather  than 
an  organisation,  and  the  idea  on  its  negative 
side  relates  to  a  profound  impatience  with 
the  ideals  and  groupings  of  the  Old  Irishmen, 
and,  on  its  positive  side,  to  an  intense  desire 
to  reconcile  all  Irishmen  to  the  common  pur- 
pose of  serving  Ireland.  The  Old  Irishmen, 
when  they  encountered  a  stranger,  began 
by  asking,  "Is  he  a  Catholic  or  a  Protes- 
tant ?  "  and  on  the  reply  to  that  question 
depended  their  readiness  to  be  friendly. 
The  Young  Irishman  does  not  care  whether 
the  stranger  be  a  Catholic  or  a  Protestant, 
so  long  as  he  is  an  Irishman  and  is  willing 

78 


THE    ULSTER   MOVEMENT 

to  work  for  Ireland.  The  Protestant  Young 
Irishman  will  turn  away  from  any  Protes- 
tant, however  devout  he  may  be,  if  he  is  not 
prepared  to  put  Ireland  before  sect ;  the 
Catholic  Yoimg  Irishman  will  turn  away 
from  any  Catholic,  even  though  he  be  a 
Cardinal,  who  is  not  prepared  to  put  Ireland 
in  the  first  place  in  his  heart.  The  religion 
of  a  Yoimg  Irishman  is  a  personal,  private 
concern  :  the  nationality  of  a  Young  Irish- 
man is  his  general,  public  affair ;  and  it  is 
possible  for  a  CathoUc  and  a  Protestant  to 
conduct  a  co-operative  creamery  or  promote 
a  scheme  of  housing  reform  without  quarrel- 
ling over  the  respective  merits  of  the  Pope 
and  William  of  Orange.  Even  the  Old 
Irishmen  were  able  to  work  with  consider- 
able amity  in  local  committees  of  the  I.A.O.S. 
The  Young  Irishmen  propose  to  do  generally 
in  Irish  politics  what  the  Old  Irishmen  did 
particularly  in  co-operative  societies. 

The  Young  Irishman  wishes  to  make  a 
drastic  change  in  the  state  of  Irish  affairs. 
Wherever  he  looks  in  Ireland  he  finds  in- 
ferior institutions,  corrupt  management,  arti- 
ficial divisions,  an  ignorant,  prejudiced  Press, 
an  luiinstructed  people  and  a  low  level  of 
subsistence.  When  he  compares  his  country 
with  England,  he  is  humiliated  by  the  differ- 
ence between  them.  He  reads  the  history  of 
Ireland,  and  has  a  sense  of  horror  when  he 
realises  how  deficient  in  spiritual  quality  his 

79 


SIR   EDWARD    CARSON 


contemporaries  are  in  comparison  with  their 
forefathers.  He  feels  that  the  greatest  dan- 
ger to  Irish  development  lies  in  the  com- 
placency and  self-deception  of  the  Irish 
people.  It  is  not  English  tyranny  which  is 
destroying  Ireland,  for  there  is  no  English 
tyranny  now  :  it  is  Irish  blindness  which  is 
destroying  it. 


Someone  said  to  Lady  Gregory  on  one 
occasion,  "Why  is  it  that  you,  who  are  an 
old  woman,  write  comedies  for  the  Abbey 
Theatre,  while  the  young  dramatists  write 
tragical  pieces  or  pieces  with  a  tendency 
towards  bitter  criticism  ?  "  Lady  Gregory 
said,  "It  is  because  I  am  an  old  woman  !  " 
And,  indeed,  it  is  natural  for  young  artists 
to  think  in  terms  of  tragedy,  whereas  the 
old,  who  know  that  life  is  full  of  the  com- 
pensation of  which  Emerson  wrote,  can 
smile  or  laugh  even  when  there  is  occasion 
for  tears.  But  Lady  Gregory's  reply  does 
not  completely  answer  the  question.  Young 
men's  minds  are  full  of  dreams  of  per- 
fection. They  love  humanity  in  the  abstract 
so  heartily  that  when  they  contemplate 
humanity  in  the  concrete,  they  lose  their 
tempers.  The  bitter  plays  that  are  written 
for  the  Abbey  Theatre  are  not  composed 
by  ill-natured  men  or  men  who  hate  Ireland : 

80 


AND    THE    ULSTER   MOVEMENT 

they  are  written  by  disappointed  men  who 
love  Ireland  so  dearly  that  they  cannot  bear 
to  see  her  failures  unmoved.  Mr.  Bernard 
Shaw  once  complained  that  when  he  drew 
attention  to  some  evil,  people  became  en- 
raged and  behaved  as  if  they  believed  that 
he  had  caused  the  evil.  That  is  the  attitude 
of  the  mass  of  Irish  people  towards  the 
Abbey  Dramatists.  Whenever  a  play  is 
performed  at  the  Abbey  in  which  some 
despicable  aspect  of  Irish  life  is  exposed,  the 
reporters  who  act  as  critics  in  Dublin 
denounce  the  author  of  it  as  a  detractor  of 
the  Irish  people,  a  slanderer,  a  decadent,  a 
perpetrator  of  outrage.  One  would  have 
imagined  that  it  would  in  time  have  become 
apparent  to  these  people  that  the  unanimity 
with  which  the  Young  Dramatists  (the  bulk 
of  whom  have  no  personal  knowledge  of  each 
other)  expose  flaw  after  flaw  in  the  Irish 
body  does  indicate  that  there  are  some 
flaws.  That,  however,  is  not  the  way  with 
the  Irish  journalist  or  the  class  for  which  he 
writes.  Their  illusion  is  that  there  are  no 
flaws  in  the  Irish  body,  and  that  anyone 
who  says  there  are  is  a  foul  calumniator. 
The  sense  of  reality  is  very  slight  in  Ireland. 
Mr.  Shaw,  in  the  preface  to  "  John  Bull's 
Other  Island,"  has  described  Englishmen  as 
sentimentalists  and  Irishmen  as  realists. 
The  description  is  not  strictly  accurate. 
Irishmen  have  a  keen  sense  of  reality  about 

r  81 


SIR   EDWARD    CARSON 


other  people  :  they  have  no  sense  of  reality 
about  themselves.  They  see  the  ridiculous 
side  of  other  men,  but  they  do  not  see  the 
ridiculous  side  of  themselves.  The  chief 
difference  between  Irishmen  and  English- 
men sometimes  seems  to  me  to  be  that 
Irishmen  have  wit  and  Englishmen  have 
humour.  I  would  rather  have  humour  than 
have  wit. 

8 

The  Young  Irishmen  desire  first  of  all  to 
bring  a  sense  of  reality  into  Ireland.  The 
struggle  for  self-government  served  as  a 
bandage  about  Ireland's  eyes.  We  have 
formally  obtained  self-government,  but  the 
bandage  is  still  in  its  place.  It  is  the  job  of 
the  Young  Irishmen  to  remove  it.  Before 
they  can  do  this,  however,  they  will  have 
to  make  Irishmen  realise  that  there  is  a 
bandage.  When  they  have  done  that,  they 
will  have  a  second  struggle  in  order  to  make 
Irishmen  realise  that  the  bandage  ought  to 
be  removed.  They  will  encounter  many 
opponents  who  will  swear,  first,  that  there 
is  no  bandage  at  all,  and,  second,  that  it  is 
a  fine  bandage  and  very  becoming  to 
Ireland's  eyes. 


82 


AND    THE    ULSTER   MOVEMENT 


I  think  the  fact  that  most  oppresses 
Young  Irishmen  is  the  lack  of  spiritual 
impulse  in  Ireland.  I  do  not  say  that 
spiritual  feeling  is  dead  in  Ireland,  for  if 
that  were  true,  Ireland  would  also  be  dead ; 
but  I  do  say  that  the  spiritual  impulse  is 
so  hidden  away  by  a  great  covering  of 
materialism  that  it  is  almost  impossible  to  see 
it.  It  is  natural,  perhaps,  that  materialism 
should  envelop  Ireland  in  these  days.  Any 
people,  suddenly  transformed  from  a  con- 
dition of  acute  poverty  to  a  condition  of 
increasing  prosperity,  is  likely  to  have  its 
table  of  values  disarranged  and  to  set  an 
absurd  price  on  material  things.  The  man 
who  has  lived  in  poverty  during  part 
of  his  life  thinks  a  great  deal  more  of 
money  when  he  gets  it  than  the  man  who 
has  always  had  money.  Ireland  is  in  that 
condition.  The  Irish  peasant  has  reached 
that  point  of  existence  at  which  money 
seems  to  him  to  be  the  only  thing  in  the 
world  that  matters.  Old  generosities  and 
finely  reckless  acts  have  been  swallowed 
up  in  ^acquisitiveness.  Mr.  Yeats,  lament- 
ing the  decline  of  the  romance  and  the 
growth  of  the  huckster  spirit  in  Ireland, 
wrote  a  poem  from  which  these  verses  are 
taken : 

88 


SIR   EDWARD    CARSON 


What  need  you,  being  come  to  sense. 

But  fumble  in  a  greasy  till 

And  add  the  half-pence  to  the  pence 

And  prayer  to  shivering  prayer,  until 

You  have  dried  the  marrow  from  the  bone  ; 

For  men  were  bom  to  pray  and  save, 

Romantic  Ireland's  dead  and  gone. 

It's  with  O'Leary  in  the  grave. 


Was  it  for  this  the  wild  geese  spread 
Their  grey  wings  upon  every  tide ; 
For  this  that  all  that  blood  was  shed. 
For  this  Edward  Fitzgerald  died 
And  Robert  Emmet  and  Wolfe  Tone, 
All  that  delirium  of  the  brave ; 
Romantic  Ireland's  dead  and  gone, 
It's  with  O'Leary  in  the  grave. 

The  natural  outcome  of  the  huckster 
spirit  is  corruption,  and  the  natural  outcome 
of  corruption  is  that  the  second-rate  is 
always  substituted  for  the  best.  It  was, 
perhaps,  natural  that  the  English  people 
should  choose  a  dishonest  meat  contractor 
for  their  Patron  Saint,  for  the  English 
cannot  even  conduct  a  war  without  defraud- 
ing each  other ;  but  it  is  lamentable  that 
the  Irish  people  should  place  a  gombeen  man 
in  the  place  of  St.  Patrick.  My  dead  friend, 
Fred  Ryan,  mocked  the  Dublin  Theosophists 
to  me  cHice.  "  Do  they  think,"  he  said, 
"  the  Irish  people  will  turn  the  Virgin  Mary 
out  of  heaven  and  put  Madame  Blavatsky 
in  her  place  !  "    They  have  done  something 

84> 


AND    THE    ULSTER    MOVEMENT 

infinitely  worse  than  that :   they  have  made 
an  altar  of  a  huckster's  till. 


The  Young  Irishmen  have  no  leader  :  he 
has  not  yet  revealed  himself,  and  until  he 
does  so,  they  will  not  have  a  corporate 
being.  The  lack  of  a  leader  means,  of  course, 
that  most  of  their  energies  will  be  dissipated 
at  first  in  expressions  of  discontent.  They 
will  be  called  Prigs,  and,  indeed,  they  will 
be  in  much  danger  of  falling  into  Priggery ; 
but  the  vital  need  of  action  will  save  the 
bulk  of  them  from  permanent  Priggery.  It 
may  be  that  Sir  Horace  Plunkett,  who  is 
their  inspiration,  will  become  their  leader, 
but  the  question  of  headship  is  not  one  of 
immediate  consequence.  The  Young  Irish- 
men have  first  of  all,  as  I  have  said,  to  bring 
a  sense  of  reality  into  Ireland.  They  have 
also  to  make  themselves  capable  of  con- 
ducting affairs.  Their  search,  for  a  time, 
will  be  for  knowledge  and  then  for  experi- 
ence ;  and  when  they  have  found  these  two 
things,  they  will  have  to  make  opinion  in 
Ireland.  They  will  have  to  spend  years  in 
undermining  the  position  of  the  Old  Irish- 
men so  that  they  may  dislodge  them  from 
authority  with  ease.  They  will  meet  in 
obscure   rooms   and    discuss   this   problem 

85 


SIR   EDWARD    CARSON 


and  that.  They  will  seek  out  young  men 
and  women  with  alert  minds  and  proselytise 
them.  They  will  talk  in  one  place  and 
another  of  ways  of  altering  things,  and  will 
fortify  themselves  with  all  the  information 
they  can  obtain.  They  will  invade  the 
newspapers,  they  will  write  letters  and 
articles  and  pamphlets  and  books,  they  will 
make  speeches  in  halls  and  at  street  corners, 
and  above  all  they  will  mock  the  Old  Irish- 
men. Ridicule  is  the  weapon  by  which  the 
self-satisfied  may  be  destroyed,  and  with 
ridicule  the  Young  Irishmen  will  arm  them- 
selves against  the  Old  Irishmen.  If  Ireland 
is  to  be  made  a  place  of  value,  the  Old 
Irishmen  and  the  things  for  which  they 
stand  must  be  destroyed.  Mr.  John  Red- 
mond and  Sir  Edward  Carson,  these  and 
their  like  must  perish  if  Ireland  is  to  be 
saved. 

6 

For  the  Young  Irishmen  are  as  impatient 
with  Mr.  Redmond  as  they  are  with  Sir 
Edward  Carson.  They  look  into  his  volume 
of  speeches  and  find  that  they  are  full  of 
stale  rhetoric,  that  Mr.  Redmond,  at  the 
end  of  his  career,  is  saying  the  same  things 
that  he  was  saying  at  the  beginning  of  it, 
not  because  of  an  invulnerable  devotion  to 
consistency,    but    simply    because    he    has 

86 


AND    THE    ULSTER   MOVEMENT 

nothing  else  to  say.  They  do  not  discover 
any  vision  in  Mr.  Redmond's  speeches.  He 
says,  "  Let's  have  Home  Rule  !  "  but  he 
does  not  say  what  is  to  be  done  with  it  when 
it  is  obtained.  They  do  not  know  what  Mr. 
Redmond  thinks  of  the  Dublin  housing 
scandal  or  the  Belfast  sweating  scandal  or 
the  corruption  in  the  municipal  bodies ; 
and  they  strongly  suspect  that  Mr.  Redmond 
is  quite  content  to  leave  these  messes  as 
they  are.  They  feel,  too,  that  he  bungled 
the  Home  Rule  Movement.  They  feel  that 
he  made  very  little  effort  to  conciliate  the 
Ulstermen,  that  he  remained  obstinate  when 
Sir  Edward  Carson  made  tentative  offers  of 
friendship.  In  his  situation  of  triumph,  they 
feel,  he  ought  to  have  gone  to  Belfast,  not 
as  a  conqueror  but  as  a  conciliator,  and  have 
asked  the  Orangemen  what  he  could  do  to 
reconcile  them  to  the  rest  of  their  country- 
men. It  was  a  time  for  generosity,  for 
quixotic  generosity,  almost  for  self-abase- 
ment. One  thinks  of  the  magnificent  self- 
abasement  of  Father  Zossima  before  Dmitri 
Karamazov  in  Doestoevsky's  novel,  "  The 
Brothers  Karamazov,"  and  wonders  what 
would  have  been  the  fate  of  Ireland  had 
Mr.  Redmond  had  some  of  the  fine  quality  of 
the  old  Russian  monk.  The  Belfast  man  is 
uncouth  in  appearance  and  harsh  in  manner, 
but  there  is  a  strong  strain  of  chivalry  in  his 
nature.     He  is  not  insensitive  to  nobility. 

87 


SIR   EDWARD    CARSON 


Men  misunderstand  him  because  his  lan- 
guage is  violent ;  they  do  not  understand 
that  he  does  not  act  as  violently  as  he 
talks.  If  Mr.  Redmond  had  been  a  man  of 
fine  temper,  if  he  had  had  any  of  the 
quality  of  which  great  men  are  made,  he 
would  have  touched  the  chivalrous  chord 
in  the  Belfastman,  and  we  might  now  be 
celebrating  the  nuptials  of  the  North  and 
the  South  instead  of  speculating  anxiously 
on  the  future  of  the  rival  armies.  .  .  . 

One's  chief  recollection  of  Mr.  Redmond's 
part  in  that  campaign  of  muddled  motives 
and  bitter  reproaches  and  lost  opportunities 
and  organised  hatred  which  culminated  in 
the  establishment  of  potentially  destructive 
forces,  is  that  he  made  a  speech  somewhere 
in  the  South  of  Ireland  in  which  he  spoke  of 
taking  the  Home  Rule  ship  into  harbour  at 
full  speed  !  When  captains  take  their  ships 
at  full  speed  into  harbour,  they  wreck 
them.  .  .  .  The  Yoimg  Irishmen  have  no 
use  for  a  man  who  openly  expresses  his 
intention  of  behaving  in  a  way  which  would 
cause  the  Board  of  Trade  to  suspend  his 
certificate  if  he  were  a  master  mariner. 


And  if  the  Young  Irishmen  cannot  dis- 
cover a  leader  or  even  a  colleague  in  Mr. 
Redmond,  they  are  equally  unable  to  dis- 

88 


AND    THE    ULSTER    MOVEMENT 

cover  a  leader  in  any  of  his  fellow  members 
of  the  English  Parliament.  Mr.  John  Dillon, 
in  the  very  middle  of  the  European  Disaster, 
went  to  Belfast  and  delivered  a  speech  to 
the  Belfast  National  Volunteers  in  which  he 
urged  them  to  perfect  themselves  in  military 
operations  so  that  they  should  "  be  pre- 
pared to  deal  with  eventualities."  Some 
apologists  for  Mr.  Dillon  have  tried  to  excuse 
this  abominable  speech  on  the  groimd  that 
similar  speeches  had  been  made  to  the  Ulster 
Volunteers  by  "  General  "  Richardson  ;  but 
the  fatuity  of  "  General  "  Richardson  (whose 
military  knowledge,  by  the  way,  was  not 
utilised  by  the  Government  in  the  course  of 
the  War)  does  not  palliate  the  fatuity  of 
Mr.  Dillon.  "  General  "  Richardson,  God 
help  him,  is  an  Enghshman  and  cannot  be 
expected  to  be  accountable  for  his  speeches, 
and  no  Irishman  will  take  the  slightest 
notice  of  him ;  but  Mr.  Dillon  is  an  Irish- 
man, and  it  is  an  unpardonable  crime  for  any 
Irishman  to  incite  one  section  of  his  country 
to  enmity  against  another  section.  It  is  a 
reconciled  Ireland  that  we  desire ;  not  an 
antagonised  Ireland. 

Nor  can  the  Young  Irishmen  put  their 
faith  in  Mr.  Joseph  Devlin.  There  was  a 
time  when  it  seemed  possible  that  Mr. 
Devlin  might  give  a  shape  to  the  Young 
Irishmen's  spirit,  but  that  hope  was  dissi- 
pated when  he  created  the  Ancient  Order  of 

89 


SIB   EDWARD    CARSON 


Hibernians,  a  sectarian  society  exclusively 
membered  by  Catholics.  Mr.  Devlin  is  a 
Belfast  man,  and  one  might  have  imagined 
that  with  the  awful  example  of  the  Orange 
Institution,  that  society  for  the  propagation 
of  religious  hatred,  before  him,  he  would 
never  have  consented  to  create  another 
party-religious  organisation.  It  may  be 
that  when  he  contemplates  the  contemptible 
society  into  which  the  Ancient  Order  of 
Hibernians  has  grown,  he  repents  of  what 
he  did ;  but  his  repentance  will  not  bring 
the  leadership  of  the  Young  Irishmen  to  him. 
Their  leader  must  be  a  man  who  is  incapable 
of  such  blunders. 

8 

When  the  Young  Irishmen  turn  from  the 
Nationalists  to  the  Unionists,  and  con- 
template the  crew  which  represents  the 
Irish  Conservatives  in  the  House  of  Com- 
mons, their  contempt  for  the  former  slithers 
into  despair  of  the  latter.  The  most  able 
of  the  Ulster  Unionists  sits  in  Westminster 
in  the  interests  of  an  English  constituency, 
but  he  is  known  to  fame  exclusively  as  the 
man  who  hurled  a  book  at  Mr.  Winston 
Churchill's  head.  It  may  be  that  it  is  very 
difficult  not  to  hurl  something  at  Mr. 
Churchill's  head,  but  Young  Irishmen  do 
not    want    amateur    hooligans    at    College 

90 


AND    THE    ULSTER    MOVEMENT 

Green,  so  Mr.  Ronald  McNeill  can  remain 
at  Westminster.* 

9 

The  Young  Irishmen  can  wait  for  their 
leader  until  he  chooses  to  take  his  place  at 
their  head.  Their  business  immediately  is 
to  make  opinion  in  Ireland  and  to  curb,  if 
they  cannot  kill,  the  huckster  spirit.  Mr. 
Robert  Lynd,  in  a  graceful  book,  "  Rambles 
in  Ireland,"  makes  a  casual  reference  to  the 
Congested  Districts  Board  in  these  terms  : 

"  Much  good  as  they  have  unquestion- 
ably done,  they  have  done  it  in  the  way 
which  least  encourages  the  spirit  of  self- 
reliance  and  independence  among  the 
people.  But  then  I  think  the  whole 
system  which  makes  the  people  turn  their 
eyes  to  London  instead  of  to  themselves 
for  help  is  an  incitement  to  servility." 

It  is  this  spirit  which  animates  the 
Young  Irishman.  Englishmen,  defending 
the  English  occupation  of  India  and  Egypt 
and  the  withholding  of  Home  Rule  from 
Ireland,  have  claimed  with  justice  that  they 
have   effected   many   beneficial   reforms   in 

*  War  makes  a  few  reputations  and  destroys  many.  It  has 
destroyed  any  reputation  for  ability  that  Mr.  Ronald  McNeill 
possessed  prior  to  August^  1914.  He  has  become  notorious  as 
the  man  who  asked  more  fatuous  questions  of  Ministers  during 
the  War  than  any  other  member  in  Parliament. 

91 


SIB   EDWARD    CARSON 


India  and  Egypt  and  in  Ireland.  I  should 
be  sorry  to  deny  that  Englishmen  have 
enormously  improved  the  conditions  of  life 
of  the  Irish  farmer  and  the  Indian  ryot  and 
the  Egyptian  fellah.  The  enactment  of  the 
Land  Purchase  Laws  in  Ireland,  the  wide- 
spread efforts  to  ameliorate  the  life  of 
Indians,  the  building  of  the  Assouan  Dam 
and  the  extraordinary  attempts  made  by 
Lord  Kitchener  to  give  some  security  of  life 
to  the  fellaheen,  all  these  are  ameliorative 
acts  of  which  Englishmen  may  legitimately 
boast.  The  creation  of  the  Assouan  Dam, 
indeed,  is  a  finer,  more  wonderful  and 
beautiful  thing  than  the  creation  of  the 
Sphinx  and  the  Pyramids,  miserable  monu- 
ments to  the  fatuous  vanity  of  kings,  made 
out  of  the  forced  labour  of  thousands  of 
labourers  to  whom  it  brought  no  pleasiu'e, 
and  serving  now  merely  as  the  occasion  for 
trite  remarks  on  Life  by  journalists  and 
Cook's  tourists.  .  .  .  But  what,  one  asks 
oneself,  is  the  purpose  of  all  these  ameliora- 
tive acts  ?  Is  it  merely  that  the  fellah's 
belly  may  be  full,  that  the  ryot  may  be  free 
of  the  money-lender,  that  the  Irish  peasant 
may  own  land  ?  Is  there  to  be  no  end  of 
this  debilitating  process  of  doing  things  for 
men  who  ought  to  be  doing  those  things 
for  themselves  ?  Is  England  always  to  be 
the  dry-nurse  of  Ireland  ?  The  Balfourian 
legislation,  designed  to  kill  Home  Rule  by 

92 


AND    THE    ULSTER   MOVEMENT 

kindness,  of  which  Mr.  Lynd  complains  in 
his  book,  has  had  the  effect  of  turning 
Irishmen  into  a  nation  of  cadgers,  continu- 
ally whining  that  the  Government  shall  do 
something  for  them  instead  of  setting  to 
work  and  doing  it  for  themselves.  Canon 
Hannay,  in  his  novels,  has  complained  of  the 
fact  that  greedy  contractors  or  lazy  people 
generally  obtain  money  from  the  Irish 
Government  for  the  erection  of  piers  that 
are  not  needed  and  the  distribution  of  seed 
potatoes  that  will  not  end  in  benefit  to  those 
to  whom  they  are  given.  All  over  Ireland 
to-day  may  be  seen  grass-grown  piers,  pro- 
viding excellent  grazing  for  cattle,  but 
serving  no  further  purpose  than  that.  It  is 
humiliating  to  a  Young  Irishman  to  observe 
these  signs  of  waste,  the  Balfourian  equiva- 
lent of  panem  et  drcenses.  If  the  money  to 
pay  for  these  piers  came  out  of  the  pockets 
of  the  Irish  people,  they  would  not  be  built ; 
but  since  that  gigantic  jackass,  the  British 
taxpayer,  is  perfectly  willing  to  pay  for  any- 
thing that  the  muttonhead  politicians  pro- 
pose, the  Irish  people  are  content  to  "  bleed 
the  blighters  !  "  If  the  process  of  "  bleeding 
the  blighters  "  could  be  limited  to  draining 
money  from  the  pockets  of  Englishmen,  I 
should  not  complain ;  but  it  cannot  so  be 
limited.  While  the  money  is  pouring  into 
Ireland,  the  manly  spirit  is  pouring  out  of  it ; 
and   in  the   end  the   virtue  remains   with 

d8 


SIR   EDWARD    CARSON 


England,  for  the  loss  of  money  is  of  little 
account,  but  the  loss  of  spirit  is  utter 
damnation. 

10 

If  we  Irishmen  may  not  do  for  ourselves 
what  Englishmen  try  to  do  for  us,  if  we 
may  not  make  decisions  even  when  those 
decisions  end  in  error,  then  Oliver  Cromwell 
had  better  have  deprived  us  of  Connacht 
as  an  alternative  to  hell.  The  fundamental 
fineness  of  Magna  Charta  lies  in  its  recog- 
nition of  the  right  of  every  Englishman  to 
make  a  fool  of  himself  if  he  pleases  to  do  so. 
The  doctrine  of  free  will  means,  if  it  means 
anything,  that  a  man  has  the  right  to  choose 
between  heaven  and  hell.  Magna  Charta  is 
the  legal  expression  of  the  doctrine  of  Free 
Will :  it  is  the  legal  repudiation  of  the 
doctrine  of  Predestination ;  it  enacts  the 
fierce  right  of  every  Briton  to  refuse  to  be 
taken  to  heaven  against  his  will.  It  is 
notable  that  when  men  are  deprived  of  this 
right,  as  Puritans  would  deprive  them  of  it, 
and  are  compelled  to  enter  heaven  against 
their  wills,  they  invariably  end  by  turning 
heaven  into  hell.  It  is  this  right  that  the 
Young  Irishmen  claim  for  theb  countrymen, 
the  right  to  make  choice,  the  right  to  do 
things  for  themselves,  the  right  to  be  free 
men,  not  cadgers  on  another  nation's  bounty. 

94 


CHAPTER    VI 

I  MUST  indicate  in  this  chapter  some  of  the 
changes  that  Young  Irishmen  desire  to  make 
in  Irish  affairs. 


There  are  too  many  priests  in  Ireland,  and 
of  late  years,  particularly  since  the  sup- 
pression of  the  congregations  in  France, 
there  has  been  an  alarming  increase  in  the 
number  of  monks  and  nuns  who  inhabit  the 
country.  It  is  very  difficult  for  a  Young 
Irishman  to  speak  or  write  on  this  subject 
because  of  his  anxiety  not  to  be  confused 
with  the  ignorant  Orangeman  and  the 
bigoted  Protestant ;  but  it  is  a  subject 
which  seriously  perturbs  the  Young  Irish- 
man, whether  he  be  a  Catholic  or  a  Protes- 
tant. The  reader  must  imderstand  at  the 
outset  that  when  I  say  there  are  too  many 
priests  in  Ireland,  I  am  not  proposing  to 
"  sap  the  foundations  of  religion  "  (priests 
are  not  the  foundations  of  religion),  nor 
am  I  even  proposing  a  campaign  of  anti- 
clericalism.  The  Young  Irishmen  desire  to 
see  a  reduction  in  the  number  of  priests,  not 
because  they  are  irreligious  (they  are  not) 

05 


SIB   EDWARD    CARSON 


nor  because  they  are  anti-Catholic  (they 
are  not),  but  because  they  believe  that  there 
is  a  limit  to  the  number  of  priests  that  any 
country  can  maintain.  Ireland,  most  un- 
happily, is  a  land  where  the  number  of 
producers  is  considerably  exceeded  by  the 
number  of  non-producers.  We  have  shoals 
of  priests,  publicans,  policemen,  lawyers 
and  officials  in  Ireland,  none  of  whom  are 
engaged  in  productive  labours  and  have,  of 
course,  to  be  maintained  by  those  who  are 
so  engaged.  The  police  force  alone  is  a 
heavy  and  unnecessary  burden  on  the  re- 
sources of  the  Irish  people.  It  is  a  common- 
place of  politics  that  although  the  number 
of  convictions  in  Scotland  considerably 
exceeds  the  number  of  convictions  in 
Ireland,  the  number  of  police  in  the  latter 
land  is  very  much  greater  than  the  number 
of  police  in  the  former.  I  have  often  seen 
big,  strapping  constables  lolling  in  the  fields 
in  the  West  of  Ireland.  If  they  are  un- 
imaginative, they  spend  a  great  deal  of 
their  time  in  fishing  (which  is  the  un- 
imaginative man's  pastime) ;  if  they  have 
any  imagination  at  all,  they  find  the  boredom 
of  their  lives  insupportable  and  are  tempted 
to  invent  crimes  with  which  they  charge 
their  neighbours  in  order  to  provide  them- 
selves with  entertaining  occupation.  I  have 
often  wondered  how  much  of  ex-Sergeant 
Sheridan's  criminal  behaviour  was  due  to 

96 


AND    THE    ULSTER   MOVEMENT 

the  possession  of  a  vivid  imagination  and 
the  lack  of  adequate  employment  for  it. 
The  police  are  all  men  of  muscular  physique 
and  would,  if  employed  in  productive  work, 
be  a  valuable  asset  to  their  country.  As 
things  are,  they  are  a  curse  to  the  com- 
munity in  which  they  are  stationed  and  an 
economic  loss  to  the  nation. 

Irish  parents,  particularly  the  mothers, 
have  a  strong  desire  to  see  one  of  their  sons 
in  the  habit  of  a  priest  or  a  minister.  Mr. 
T.  C.  Murray,  in  a  notable  play,  "  Maurice 
Harte,"  has  shown  both  the  strength  of  this 
pride  and  the  disaster  in  which  it  may  end. 
It  is  an  ambition  which  is  not  limited  to 
Catholic  parents.  The  pride  with  which  a 
father  and  mother  in  Cork  see  their  son 
celebrating  his  first  Mass  is  no  greater  than 
the  pride  with  which  a  father  and  mother  in 
Down  hear  their  son  preaching  his  first 
sermon ;  and  the  personal  sacrifices  made 
by  the  parents  in  order  that  a  son  may 
become  a  priest  or  a  minister  would  be 
heroic  if  the  ambition  were  not  in  most  cases 
prompted  by  snobbery.  It  proceeds  less 
from  the  love  of  God  than  from  "  swank," 
from  a  desire  less  to  look  well  in  the  eyes  of 
the  Almighty  than  from  a  desire  to  look 
well  in  the  eyes  of  the  neighbours.  The 
principal  result  of  this  social  ambition  is 
that  all  over  Ireland  energy  and  intellect 
are   being   forced   into   one   channel.      The 

G  97 


SIR   EDWARD    CARSON 


farmer  who  longs  to  see  his  son  in  biretta 
aiMl  cassock  educates  that  son  at  the  expense 
of  his  remaining  children,  and  very  often 
impoverishes  himself  in  order  to  do  it.  Mr. 
Lennox  Robinson,  in  his  play  "  Harvest," 
has  treated  this  subject  dramatically. 
Education,  in  short,  is  iot  spread  equalfy 
over  all  the  children  of  the  family,  but  is 
lavished  on  one  of  them  :  the  boy  who  is 
dedicated  to  the  priesthood  goes  to  May- 
nooth,  while  his  brothers  and  sisters  go  to 
the  National  School.  The  educational  course 
at  Maynooth,  as  has  been  pointed  out  by  Sir 
Horace  Plunkett  in  "  Ireland  in  the  New 
Century,"  is  of  mediocre  quality,  but  it  is 
immeasurably  superior  to  the  scandalously 
bad  educational  system  of  the  elementary 
schools.  The  difference  between  an  English 
Council  School  and  an  Irish  National  School 
is  almost  the  difference  between  a  University 
and  a  private  school  for  the  sons  and 
daughters  of  reduced  gentlemen  kept  in  a 
back  parlour  in  a  second-rate  suburb  by  a 
perfect  lady  who  considers  that  her  gentility 
is  adequate  compensation  for  her  ignorance 
and  incapacity.  If  the  Irish  priests  were 
maintaining  the  reputation  for  learning 
which  was  established  by  their  predecessors 
in  the  days  when  Ireland  sent  a  stream  of 
saints  and  scholars  over  the  waste  places  of 
Europe  to  fertilise  them,  this  concentration 
of  knowledge  in  one  class  might  not  greatly 

98 


AND    THE    ULSTER    MOVEMENT 

matter  ;  but  it  is  pitiably  obvious  to  anyone 
who  comes  into  contact  with  the  modern 
Irish  priests  that  they  are,  on  the  whole, 
men  of  poor  intellectual  quality  and  in- 
considerable scholarship.  Here  is  a  problem 
of  terrific  dimensions.  The  chief  energies  of 
masses  of  Irish  parents  are  devoted  to 
securing  the  education  of  a  priest  at  May- 
nooth  without,  however,  securing  a  scholarly 
clergy,  and  the  remaining  children  are  left 
to  receive  an  intolerably  bad  instruction 
which  does  not  make  them  fit  to  take  an 
adequate  part  in  the  conflicts  of  existence. 
A  badly-educated  farmer  is  an  inefficient 
farmer,  ninety-nine  times  out  of  a  hundred, 
and  in  a  country  where  the  bulk  of  the 
industry  is  agricultural,  an  inefficient  farm- 
ing-class means  national  disaster. 

The  reader  will  perceive  that  the  con- 
tinued existence  of  an  excessive  number  of 
priests  and  policemen,  absolutely  non-pro- 
ductive classes,  on  incomes  which  are 
comparatively  better  than  the  incomes  of 
farmers  and  workmen  in  Ireland,  is  a 
factor  of  adverse  influence  on  Irish  destiny, 
particularly  when  he  learns  that  the  social 
conscience  of  the  priests  seems,  in  this 
generation,  to  be  dormant.  Perhaps  it 
would  be  fairer  to  say  that  the  priests  of 
to-day  are  oddly  lacking  in  a  sense  of 
proportion.  Some  very  ill-natured  attacks 
have  been  made  on  them  because  of  the 

99 


SIR   EDWARD    CARSON 


epidemic  of  church-building  which  has 
afflicted  them  during  the  past  twenty  years  ; 
but  it  is  impossible  to  acquit  the  priests  of 
inconsiderate  conduct  in  this  respect.  It  is 
very  human  of  a  priest  to  desire  to  have 
a  handsome  edifice  in  his  parish,  and  in 
favourable  circumstances,  it  is  very  laudable 
of  him  to  possess  such  a  desire ;  but  it  is 
an  act  of  social  selfishness  for  a  priest  to 
compel  his  parishioners  to  pay  for  the 
erection  of  a  church  which  is  utterly  dis- 
proportionate in  size  and  cost  to  their 
needs,  and  many  priests  have  brought  some 
of  their  people  into  financial  straits  if  not 
to  actual  bankruptcy  through  this  passion 
for  bigness.  If  the  churches  which  are 
erected  had  any  beauty,  one  might  be  more 
lenient  to  these  extravagances,  but  most  of 
them  are  so  outrageously  ugly,  surpassing 
the  ugliest  nonconformist  chapel  in  England 
in  sheer  blatant  hideousness,  that  the  lover 
of  fine  architecture  when  he  contemplates 
them  feels  an  insurgent  desire  to  send  for 
the  house-breaker.  The  priests,  in  short, 
not  only  impose  heavy  money  burdens  on 
their  flocks,  but  also  debase  the  public  taste. 
Where  exactly  is  to  be  found  the  room  for 
spiritual  emotion  is  difficult  to  say. 

In  many  ways,  too,  the  priests  add  to  the 
economic  straits  of  their  parishioners.  I  do 
not  propose  to  set  out  a  list  of  these  burdens 
here.     It  will  be  sufficient  for  my  purpose 

100 


AND    THE    ULSTER   MOVEMENT 

if  I  name  one  of  them.  The  marriage  fees 
charged  by  Irish  priests  are  outrageous. 
An  aged  peasant  in  the  West  once  complained 
bitterly  to  me  of  the  financial  exactions 
made  by  his  parish  priest,  whom  he  stigma- 
tised as  a  man  who  never  did  anything  for 
the  poor  "  but  live  on  them,"  and  he 
compared  the  priest  with  the  Protestant 
clergyman  very  much  to  the  disadvantage 
of  the  priest.  It  appeared  that  the  Father 
demanded  five  pounds  (and  sometimes  more) 
for  performing  the  marriage  ceremony.  "  He 
counts  the  cars  at  the  weddin',  sir,"  said  the 
old  man,  "  an'  fixes  his  charge  accordin'  to 
the  number  that  are  in  it !  "  I  suggested  to 
him  that  the  parishioners  should  refuse  to 
pay  these  exorbitant  sums,  but  the  old  man 
saw  no  sense  in  that.  "  Sure,  he'd  lave 
you  at  the  altar  !  "  he  replied  conclusively. 
In  the  same  village,  I  met  a  man  who,  at 
the  time  of  his  marriage,  lived  in  a  different 
parish  from  that  in  which  his  bride  lived. 
He  had  to  pay  marriage  fees  of  equal 
amounts  to  the  priest  of  each  parish,  about 
ten  pounds  in  all.  These  fees,  the  reader 
must  remember,  are  paid  by  men  whose 
average  weekly  earnings  are  probably  under 
a  pound.  Civil  marriages,  of  course,  are  out 
of  all  thought  for  Irish  Catholic  peasants 
because  of  their  religious  devotion  and  also 
of  the  social  ostracism  that  such  marriages 
would    create.      I    have    always    believed, 

101 


SIR   EDWARD   CARSON 


indeed  I  can  prove,  that  the  stories  of 
priestly  tyranny  in  Ireland  are  greatly 
exaggerated.  Parnell,  for  example,  beat 
the  priests  in  every  combat  with  them. 
I  doubt,  indeed,  whether  the  tyranny  of  an 
Irish  priest  is  any  greater  than  the  tyranny 
of  an  English  coimtry  parson;  and  I  dare 
say  farm  labourers  in  the  Home  Counties, 
more  especially  those  who  are  Dissenters, 
could  tell  stories  of  arrogant  vicars  which 
are  as  lurid  as  any  that  can  be  told  of  Irish 
priests  by  Belfast  Orangemen.  But  there  is 
enough  tyranny  displayed  by  priests  towards 
parishioners  to  make  Young  Irishmen  wish 
that  there  was  a  great  deal  less  of  it. 

The  Young  Irishmen  have  no  leeal  remedy 
to  offer  for^  this  state  of  affafrs.  They 
realise  that  the  change  must  grow  naturally 
out  of  the  hearts  of  the  people  themselves. 
I  have  met  Irishmen  (Mr.  Bernard  Shaw  is 
one  of  them)  who  think  that  the  Catholic 
Church  ought  to  be  established  so  that  the 
priests  can  be  regulated  by  law ;  but  this 
is  not  a  remedy  which  appeals  to  many 
Young  Irishmen,  who  are  convinced  that  in 
a  country  where  the  people  are  not  all  of 
one  faith,  the  State  had  better  not  have 
any  official  cognisance  of  the  Churches. 
Mr.  Shaw  would  establish  all  the  religious 
bodies,  but  the  views  of  Yoimg  Irishmen 
are  that,  where  all  the  people  are  of  one 
faith,  Establishment  is  unnecessary,  and  that 

102 


^ 


AND   THE    ULSTER   MOVEMENT 

where  the  people  are  of  diverse  faiths, 
EstabHshment  is  impossible.  The  hope  of 
the  Young  Irishmen  lies  in  the  development 
of  the  Irish  educational  system.  An  in- 
structed people  will  not  tolerate  the  tyranny, 
great  or  small,  of  the  priest.  Moreover,  a 
better  system  of  education  will  enable  those 
who  are  engaged  in  the  ordinary  industries 
of  the  country  to  ply  their  trades  with  better 
results,  and  it  may  be  that  in  time  the 
snobbery  which  has  impelled  so  many  men 
into  the  priesthood  will  disappear  or  at  all 
events  greatly  decline,  and  that  in  place  of 
the  seekers  of  soft  jobs  who  now  occupy 
Catholic  presbyteries  we  may  get  a  new 
body  of  priests  who  are  priests  because  they 
really  have  a  vocation  for  their  office.  The 
chief  hope  of  the  Young  Irishman,  however, 
lies  in  the  stirring  of  social  conscience 
among  the  priests  themselves.  Yoiuig 
priests  are  more  amenable  to  the  ideas  of 
the  Young  Irishmen  than  priests  of  an 
older  generation.  They  have  learned  that 
a  costly  building  does  not  compensate  for 
an  impoverished  and  uneducated  people. 


The  attitude  of  the  Young  Irishmen 
towards  conventual  and  monastic  establish- 
ments  is  rigid  and  certain.     They  beUeve, 

108 


SIR   EDWARD    CARSON 


whether  they  be  Cathohc  or  Protestant,  in 
the  most  stringent  regulation  of  all  monas- 
teries, convents,  orphanages  and  charitable 
institutions  :  a  Protestant  orphanage  or 
charitable  institution  should,  in  their 
opinion,  be  as  rigorously  inspected  as  a 
Catholic  convent.  The  probability  is  that 
Protestants  would  not  object  to  such  inspec- 
tion because  their  orphanages,  particularly 
in  Dublin,  are  proselytising  agencies  rather 
than  pseudo-charitable,  pseudo-industrial 
organisations.  The  proposal  to  submit 
convents  and  monasteries  to  the  juris- 
diction of  the  Factory  Act  is  supported  to 
an  astonishing  extent  by  secular  priests, 
who  do  not  regard  the  religious  orders  with 
too  kindly  an  eye,  those  of  them,  that  is, 
that  are  of  a  monastic  character.  The  non- 
secular  priests  sometimes  enter  into  com- 
petition with  the  seculars  for  the  patronage 
of  the  people.  The  reason  why  the  Young 
Irishmen  desire  to  bring  religious  establish-' 
ments  within  the  scope  of  the  Factory  Acts 
is  that  many  of  them  are  sweat-shops  of 
the  worst  kind  :  girls  are  employed  in  them 
in  the  name  of  charity  and  religion  at  wages 
which  would  scandalise  the  worst  sweater 
in  Belfast  or  Bethnal  Green ;  and  the 
products  of  this  sweated  labour  are  sold  in 
competition  with  similar  products  from 
ordinary  workshops  at  prices  which  make 
profit    impossible    for    the    general    manu- 

104. 


AND    THE    ULSTER    MOVEMENT 

facturer  and  shopkeeper.  The  convents, 
indeed,  suck  the  vitaHty  out  of  Ireland. 
Girls  of  the  Catholic  faith  always  desire  to 
be  nuns  when  they  are  seventeen,  just  as 
English  girls  of  the  same  age  always  desire 
to  Do  Good  to  the  Poor  or  marry  clergymen 
or  become  hospital  nurses.  (It  was  that 
appalling  female,  Pamela,  in  Richardson's 
novel,  who  said,  "  How  amiable  a  thing  it 
is  to  do  good  I  ")  If  the  girls  are  the 
daughters  of  men  of  means,  they  are  en- 
couraged by  the  nuns  to  enter  a  convent, 
and  they  take  their  fortunes  with  them. 
In  a  country  with  a  small  and  declining 
population,  any  increase  in  the  number  of 
pledged  virgins  is  alarming,  but  when  that 
increase  is  accompanied  by  the  withdrawal 
of  money  from  the  ordinary  circuits  of 
society  in  order  that  it  may  be  used  as  a 
subsidy  to  a  sweated  industry,  the  position 
becomes  very  critical.  On  the  one  hand, 
young  women  of  fortune  are  turned  from 
the  purposes  of  life  in  a  country  where,  more 
perhaps  than  anywhere  else,  it  is  needful 
that  the  purposes  of  life  should  be  fulfilled  ; 
and  on  the  other  hand,  young  women  with- 
out fortune  are  employed  at  wages  which 
are  inadequate  to  maintain  them  in  health 
and  efficiency  and  so  renders  them  unfit  for 
the  function  of  maternity.  Added  to  these 
vital  losses  are  the  trade  losses  sustained  by 
tradesmen  who,  even  when  paying  sweating 

105 


SIR   EDWARD    CARSON 


wages,  cannot  compete  with  the  religious 
orders  subsidised  by  nuns'  fortunes  and  the 
charitable  donations  of  the  devout.  If  the 
Catholic  Church  does  not  of  its  own  volition 
regulate  these  religious  orders,  we  may  yet 
see  a  national  demand  for  their  expulsion 
from  Ireland  which  will  be  as  implacable  as 
the  demand  for  their  expulsion  from  France. 
The  Irish  peasant  loves  God,  but  he  also 
loves  money,  and  he  will  not  long  tolerate 
congregations  of  people  who  exploit  his  love 
of  God  in  order  that  they  may  ruin  him. 
The  Young  Irishmen  would  prefer  that  this 
work  of  regulation  should  be  done  by  the 
Church,  and  there  are  many  reasons,  more 
obvious  to  priests  than  to  laymen,  why  it 
should  be  done  by  the  Church.  If  fortunes 
are  absorbed  by  the  convents,  and  tradesmen 
are  brought  near  to  bankruptcy  by  the 
competition  of  convent  industries,  then  the 
secular  priests'  sources  of  revenue  are 
curtailed  I  .  .  . 

8 

A  second  grave  danger  to  Ireland  is  con- 
nected with  the  drink  traffic.  On  the  day 
on  which  this  section  of  this  chapter  was 
written,  the  English  newspapers  contained 
reports  of  the  parliamentary  debate  in 
which  Mr.  Lloyd  George  announced  his  table 
of  increased  duties  on  spirits.     The  Irish 

106 


AND   THE    ULSTER   MOVEMENT 

Nationalists,  to  a  man,  opposed  the  new 
taxes.  This  singular  unanimity  (for  all 
Tories  and  all  Radicals  are  not  unanimous 
on  Drink  questions)  is  due  to  the  fact  that 
the  Irish  Nationalist  Party,  so  to  speak,  is 
kept  by  the  Irish  publicans.  The  publican, 
indeed,  is  the  most  dangerous  of  all  the 
enemies  the  Irish  people  have,  and  the  task 
of  conquering  him  will  absorb  a  considerable 
part  of  the  energies  of  the  Young  Irishmen 
for  many  generations.  It  is  not  alone  that 
he  is  a  retailer  of  liquor,  which,  up  to  a  point, 
is  harmless  enough,  but  that  he  is  able, 
through  his  side  activities,  to  climb  to  a 
position  of  power  in  national  and  local 
politics.  The  publican  is  often  the  gombeen- 
man. He  lends  money  to  his  neighbours  at 
rates  of  interest  fixed  by  his  own  caprice  on 
condition  that  the  borrower  deals  exclusively 
with  him.  This  means  that  the  borrower 
must  purchase  provisions  and  stores  from 
the  gombeen-man  at  prices  fixed,  not  by  the 
laws  of  supply  and  demand  (for  there  are 
no  laws  of  supply  and  demand  in  country 
parts  in  Ireland)  but  by  the  gombeen-man's 
knowledge  of  the  borrower's  capacity  to 
pay.  It  also  means  that  the  borrower  must 
sell  the  products  of  his  farm  to  the  gombeen- 
man, again  at  prices  fixed  by  the  latter. 
Money  seldom  passes  between  the  two 
parties  in  these  sales.  The  sum  allowed  for 
the  farm  produce  is  set  against  the  debt 

107 


SIR   EDWARD    CARSON 

incurred  for  provisions  and  drink  and  stores 
and  the  reduction,  if  possible,  of  the  amount 
of  the  loan.  It  is  inevitable  that  farms 
should  be  mortgaged  to  these  gombeen-men 
and  that  many  farms  are  forfeited  to  them. 
We  may  witness  the  growth  in  Ireland  of  a 
new  race  of  landlords,  without  tradition  or 
grace,  who  will  involve  their  tenants  in 
hardships  as  severe  as  those  which  were 
inflicted  upon  them  by  the  old  race. 

The  publicans,  because  of  their  wealth 
and  the  peculiar  influence  they  exercise  on 
their  neighbours,  have  a  greater  amount  of 
political  power  than  any  other  body  of  men 
in  Ireland.  They  and  their  nominees  serve 
on  every  local  authority  in  the  country, 
while  the  parliamentary  party  is  like  putty 
in  their  hands.  And  wherever  their  influence 
is  exercised,  it  is  expressed  in  terms  of 
corruption  and  jobbery.  Mr.  Seumas 
O 'Kelly  has  written  a  play,  called  "  The 
Bribe,"  in  which  he  shows  that  it  is  im- 
possible to  secure  the  appointment  of  a 
dispensary  doctor  without  some  show  of 
corruption.  The  Irish  publican,  intent  on 
his  own  enrichment,  even  if  it  causes  the 
ruin  of  his  country,  seeks  to  establish  in 
Ireland  something  of  the  organisation  which 
his  emigrant  kinsman  has  established  in 
Tammany  Hall. 


108 


AND    THE    ULSTER    MOVEMENT 


The  English  reader  may  very  well  be 
appalled  by  the  suggestion  that  corruption 
and  bribery  are  rampant  in  Irish  afiairs, 
and  an  unintelligent  reader  may  be  inclined 
to  think  that  the  concession  of  self-govern- 
ment to  Ireland  is,  in  these  circumstances, 
a  huge  mistake.  He  should  remember  that 
the  Union  was  established  by  bribery  and 
corruption  of  an  unprecedented  character, 
and  that  all  the  disregard  of  social  service 
which  the  Young  Irishmen  deplore  springs 
directly  from  the  corruptly- wrought  Union. 
The  Yoimg  Irishmen  do  not  underestimate 
the  extent  of  this  corruption.  They  realise 
that  it  cannot  be  checked  and  destroyed 
otherwise  than  by  throwing  Irishmen  on  to 
their  own  resources  and  leaving  them  to 
work  out  their  own  salvation.  They  do  not 
despair  of  achieving  the  downfall  of  the 
publican  in  his  character  as  corrupt  gombeen- 
man,  for  they  have  the  weapon  for  his 
destruction  already  forged.  The  co-opera- 
tive societies  will  kill  the  gombeen-men  if 
they  are  not  cramped  by  the  pohticians. 
The  gombeen-men  recognise  the  danger  to 
themselves  in  the  I.A.O.S.,  and  they  have 
intrigued  continually  in  order  to  thwart  the 
efforts  of  those  who  control  it.  The  dis- 
graceful episode  which  culminated  in  the 

109 


"T?!?^:- 


SIR   EDWARD    CARSON 


resignation  of  Sir  Horace  Plunkett  from  the 
Vice-Presidency ^of  the  Department  of  Agri- 
culture is  part  of  the  history  of  the  Irish 
Nationalist  Party  and  is  directly  attributable 
to  the  influence  of  the  publican  gombeen- 
men. The  Ulster  Unionists  who  professed 
to  mourn  over  the  resignation  of  Sir  Horace, 
are,  however,  as  blameworthy  as  the 
gombeen-men ;  for  it  was  their  nasty  little 
Orangemen  who  secured  his  dislodgment 
from  his  parliamentary  seat  because  of  his 
sympathies  with  Home  Rule,  and  thus 
provided  the  Nationalists  with  the  excuse 
for  demanding  his  resignation  on  the  ground 
that  a  man  ought  not  to  occupy  a  Govern- 
ment position  when  he  is  unable  to  win  a 
seat  in  the  House  of  Commons.  This 
complaint  was  not  made  against  Sir  Horace 
Plunkett's  successor,  Mr.  T.  W.  Russell, 
although  he  could  not  find  a  seat  in  Parlia- 
ment for  some  time  after  his  appointment 
to  the  Vice-Presidency ;  but  then  Mr. 
Russell,  the  temperance  hotel  proprietor, 
is  a  friend  of  the  gombeen-man,  and  the 
gombeen-man  is  the  master  of  the  Parlia- 
mentary Nationalists. 

5 

The  Young  Irishmen  will  endeavour  to 
extend  the  work  of  the  I.A.O.S.  far  beyond 
its  present  boundaries.     The  Society  now 

110 


AND   THE    ULSTER   MOVEMENT 

receives  a  very  slender  subsidy  from  the 
Development  Commission.  The  Young 
Irishmen  will  endeavour  to  obtain  a  large 
subsidy  for  the  Society  from  Irish  funds  in 
order  (a)  to  enlarge  the  scope  of  the  Society, 
and  (h)  to  make  Irishmen  interested  in  a 
body  for  which  they  have  to  pay  a  con- 
siderable sum.  They  believe  that  Irishmen 
may  easily  displace  Danes  as  the  dairy- 
farmers  of  England,  but  they  do  not  believe 
that  it  is  possible  for  this  change  to  be  made 
outside  the  co-operative  movement.  Sub- 
sidies, by  themselves,  however,  will  not 
enable  the  I.A.O.S.  to  develop  the  agri- 
cultural resources  of  Ireland.  It  is  needful, 
too,  that  the  means  of  transport  should  be 
developed,  and  that  there  should  be  greater 
facilities  for  yoimg  men  and  women  to 
obtain  highly  skilled  technical  instruction. 


6 

It  will  be  necessary  to  nationalise  the 
Irish  railways  and  canals.  The  Irish  railway 
system  is  very  nearly  the  most  inefficient  in 
the  world.  It  takes  as  long  to  travel  from 
Fair  Head  in  Antrim  to  Cape  Clear  in  Cork, 
although  the  distance  is  only  three  hundred 
miles,  as  it  does  to  cross  the  continent  of 
Europe,  and  if  the  somnolent  gentlemen 
who  direct  the  railways  were  left  to  them- 

111 


SIR   EDWARD    CARSON 


selves,  it  would  take  almost  as  long  to 
perform  the  journey  as  it  takes  to  cross  from 
one  side  of  the  United  States  to  the  other. 
Freight  charges  are  absurdly  high,  and 
these,  added  to  the  inefficiency  and  slowness 
of  the  service  and  the  fact  that  every 
hundred  miles  of  track  seems  to  be  owned 
by  a  different  company,  make  the  develop- 
ment of  agriculture  and  dairy-farming  diffi- 
cult. A  Royal  Commission  on  Irish  Railways 
reported  in  favour  of  their  nationalisation 
a  few  years  ago,  and  public  opinion  is 
prepared  for  such  a  measure. 


But  most  important  of  all  the  reforms  that 
are  desired  by  the  Young  Irishmen  is  the 
reform  of  the  Irish  educational  system.  The 
instruction  given  is  inadequate — no  Irish 
child  attending  an  elementary  school  receives 
any  historical  education  whatever — and  it 
is  of  a  sort  that  is  calculated  to  produce,  at 
best,  a  half-baked  clerk.  The  teachers  are 
very  badly  paid  and  most  of  them  are  un- 
trained. The  ratio  of  teachers  who  go  to 
the  Training  College  in  Dublin  is  small  in 
comparison  with  the  number  who  do  not  go 
to  any  Training  College.  The  Yoimg  Irish- 
men wish  to  see  a  body  of  well-paid,  highly- 
trained  school  teachers  in  Ireland,  and,  since 

112 


AND    THE    ULSTER   MOVEMENT 

Ireland  is  an  agricultural  country,  they  wish 
the  teachers  to  have  a  wide  knowledge  of 
technical  agricultural  subjects.  There  are 
dairy  schools  in  Ireland,  but  they  are  few  in 
number  and  used  chiefly  by  people  of  some 
means.  The  Young  Irishmen  wish  to  see 
technical  instruction  given  generally  and 
freely.  They  will  not  be  content  until  the 
Irish  people  are  as  skilful  with  their  hands 
as  they  are  with  their  tongues. 

There  is  another  reform  in  education 
strongly  desired  by  the  Young  Irishmen 
which  will  probably  make  bitter  contro- 
versy. They  desire  to  exclude  the  priest 
and  the  minister  from  the  managership  of 
the  schools.  Each  school  in  Ireland  is 
attached  to  a  church,  and  the  children  of  a 
particular  faith  go  to  the  school  of  that 
faith.  In  Belfast,  for  example,  the  Presby- 
terian children  generally  receive  their  edu- 
cation at  the  Presbyterian  schools,  the 
Episcopalian  children  at  the  Episcopal 
schools,  the  Catholic  children  at  the  Catholic 
schools,  and  so  on.  In  this  way  a  very 
undesirable  segregation  of  children  is  secured, 
and  little  boys  and  girls  are  made  aware  of 
the  differences  of  sect  at  a  time  when  they 
ought  only  to  know  of  hoops  and  tops.  The 
priest  or  minister  of  the  particular  church 
IS  invariably  the  manager  of  the  school,  and 
he  has  a  power  over  the  headmaster  and  the 
teachers  which  it  is  not  desirable  that  any 

H  lis 


SIR   EDWARD    CARSON 

man,  much  less  a  cleric,  should  possess.  In 
a  very  notable  novel,  called  "  Waiting,"  by 
Mr.  Donovan,  there  is  a  vivid  account  of  the 
unfortunate  manner  in  which  a  priest  who 
is  manager  of  a  school  can  spoil  an  attempt 
to  give  children  an  education  of  value  to 
them.  The  reader  of  this  novel  must  not 
fall  into  the  error  of  imagining  that  it  deals 
with  matters  exclusively  relating  to  Catholic 
schools.  Masters  of  Protestant  schools  in 
Belfast  could  parallel  in  some  measure  the 
experience  of  the  master  in  Mr.  Donovan's 
book.  The  Young  Irishmen,  too,  wish  to 
dissociate  Irish  elementary  education  from 
all  sectarian  religious  instruction,  which 
means,  in  Ireland,  that  elementary  school 
teachers  will  not  be  called  upon  to  give  any 
religious  instruction  at  all.  The  proper 
persons  to  give  religious  instruction  are 
priests  and  parsons.  That  is  their  spiritual 
function.  It  is  also  what  they  are  paid  to 
do.  In  country  places,  the  clergy  must 
often  find  time  weighing  heavy  on  their 
hands.  The  Young  Irishmen,  by  preventing 
the  school  teachers  from  giving  religious 
instruction  and  thus  forcing  the  clergy  to 
give  it,  will  perform  the  useful  labour  of 
giving  the  clergy  something  to  do  on  week- 
days. It  is  desirable  that  the  religious 
instruction  should  be  given  in  the  churches 
and  not  in  the  schools.  The  Young  Irishmen 
do  not  wish  the  schools  to  be  connected  in 

114 


AND    THE    ULSTER   MOVEMENT 

any  way  with  sectarianism.  They  are  as 
Httle  anxious  that  a  child  should  learn  its 
letters  with  the  brand  of  Catholic  or  Presby- 
terian, so  to  speak,  on  its  lesson-books  as 
they  are  that  adults  should  plant  potatoes 
or  build  ships  in  the  spirit  of  sectarians. 
One  miserable  result  of  the  segregation  of 
school  children  into  sects  is  that  men 
cannot  work  together  in  the  shipyards 
without  periodicaUy  battering  each  other's 
heads. 


8 

And  what  proposals  of  reform  have  the 
Young  Irishmen  to  offer  in  the  industrial 
areas  of  Ireland  ? 

The  establishment  of  a  parliament  in 
Dublin  will  have  the  effect  ultimately  of 
making  working-men  in  Belfast  class- 
conscious  instead  of  sect-conscious ;  and 
we  may  expect  to  see  a  great  growth  in 
Trade  Unionism  in  Ireland  where,  at  present, 
it  is  weak.  The  wide  extent  of  the  sweating 
evil  in  Belfast  has  now  been  irrefutably 
established  by  a  Committee  of  Enquiry,  and 
no  one  attempts  to  deny  that  the  conditions 
of  housing  in  Dublin  are  abominable.  When 
the  Protestant  workman  realises  that  Home 
Rule  does  not  mean  that  he  will  have  to 
attend  Mass  and  make  confession  and  say 

115 


i!rTr^'WiF»*^ 


SIR   EDWARD    CARSON 


his  prayers  to  the  Virgin  Mary  (which  is 
what  he  now  believes)  he  will  begin  to 
wonder  why  it  is  that  labourers  in  Belfast, 
whether  they  are  Catholic  or  Protestant, 
outside  the  shipyards  receive  a  wage  of  14s. 
to  16s.  per  week ;  and  we  may  expect 
a  demand  in  time  for  a  Minimum  Wage. 
The  Young  Irishmen  will  encourage  the 
labourer  to  make  that  demand.  When  men 
are  secured  in  a  living  wage  in  Belfast,  it 
will  not  be  desperately  necessary  for  married 
women  to  go  into  mills  and  factories  in  order 
to  earn  enough  to  bring  their  husbands' 
wages  up  to  the  sum  which  is  necessary  to 
maintain  a  family  even  in  a  semi-starved 
state.  Early  in  this  book,  I  stated  that  the 
rate  of  pauperism  in  Belfast  is  very  low,  and 
that  Ulster  Unionists  make  a  boast  of  this 
as  a  sign  of  the  efficiency  and  prosperity  of 
their  city  in  comparison  with  Dublin,  where 
the  rate  of  pauperism  is  three  times  as  high 
as  it  is  in  Belfast.  At  one  time,  indeed, 
Ulster  Unionists  made  the  egregious  boast 
that  there  was  no  poverty  in  Belfast, 
although  every  man  who  uses  his  eyes  and 
nose  can  speedily  discover  that  there  is. 
If  this  boast  were  well  founded,  Belfast 
woiild  be  imique  among  industrial  cities, 
for  poverty  and  slimis  seem  to  be  insepar- 
able from  the  modem  city.  This  boast  was 
not  maintained  for  a  very  long  time,  but  a 
change    was   made   in   its  character.     The 

116 


AND    THE    ULSTER    MOVEMENT 

second  assertion  was  that  if  there  were  any 
poverty  and  slums  in  Belfast  they  were  to 
be  foxind  only  in  Catholic  quarters.  In 
controversy  with  a  very  able  linen  lord,  Mr. 
J.  H.  Sterling,  the  managing  director  of  the 
York  Street  Flax  Spinning  and  Weaving 
Company,  Limited,  the  largest  concern  of 
its  kind  in  the  world,  I  quoted  in  the 
columns  of  The  New  Age  a  long  list  of 
Belfast  streets,  almost  exclusively  occupied 
by  Protestants,  which  are  definitely  poor, 
and  in  some  cases,  slum  areas.  I  also  quoted 
statistics  from  the  report  of  the  Medical 
Officer  of  Health  for  Belfast  (Dr.  Bailie)  in 
which  I  showed  that  the  percentage  of 
deaths  from  infectious  diseases  is  higher  in 
Protestant  wards  than  in  Catholic  wards. 
I  do  not  know  how  to  account  for  this  fact, 
nor  do  I  wish  the  reader  to  infer  that  a 
belief  in  the  infallibility  of  the  Pope  will 
secure  a  man  from  the  ravages  of  scarlet  fever 
or  pulmonary  diseases,  nor  is  it  any  satis- 
faction to  me  to  find  that  this  is  the  state  of 
affairs.  I  quoted  these  statistics  merely  in 
order  to  refute  misstatements  made  for 
contemptible  purposes.  Dr.  Bailie  expressly 
stated  in  his  Report  that  these  infectious 
diseases  and  the  very  high  rate  of  mortality 
both  among  adults  and  among  infants  were 
due  to  poverty,  insanitary  homes  and  in- 
adequate nourishment. 

The  Ulster  Unionists,  in  quoting  the  rate 

117 


SIR   EDWARD    CARSON 


of  pauperism  in  Belfast,  omitted  to  mention 
that  this  low  rate  is  obtained  by  a  harsh 
administration  of  the  Poor  Law.  They 
omitted  to  state  that  the  Board  of  Guardians 
in  Belfast,  in  contrast  with  the  Boards  of 
Guardians  in  the  principal  Poor  Law  areas 
in  England  and  also  in  Dublin,  refuse  to 
grant  Outdoor  Rehef  except  in  a  very 
restricted  number  of  cases.  The  temporarily 
distressed  person  who  applies  to  these 
Guardians  for  relief  must  either  enter  the 
General  Mixed  Workhouse  and  suffer  the 
disintegration  of  his  home  and  the  peculiar 
stigma  which  attaches  to  an  inmate  of  the 
Workhouse,  or  else  go  without  relief.  One 
begins  to  understand  why  the  rate  of  pauper- 
ism is  low  in  Belfast.  One  realises  too  that 
it  is  in  no  way  a  measure  of  the  amount  of 
poverty  in  the  Ulster  capital,  because  proud 
workmen,  however  distressed  they  may  be, 
will  starve  outside  the  Workhouse  rather 
than  be  relieved  inside  it.  Any  Board  of 
Guardians  can  reduce  its  rate  of  pauperism 
by  restricting  Outdoor  Relief  or,  as  in  the 
case  of  the  Poor  Law  Authority  of  Clones, 
by  refusing  to  grant  Outdoor  ReUef  at  all ; 
but  no  one  but  a  born  fool  or  a  party 
politician  believes  that  by  doing  this,  the 
Guardians  are  reducing  the  amount  of 
poverty.  When  the  Ulster  Unionist  points 
out  that  the  rate  of  pauperism  in  Dublin  is 
three  times  as  great  as  it  is  in  Belfast,  he 

118 


AND    THE    ULSTER   MOVEMENT 

wishes  his  auditor  to  believe  that  there  are 
three  times  as  many  poor  people  in  Dublin 
as  in  Belfast.  The  imtruth  of  this  suggestion 
can  be  proved  by  a  reference  to  the  Vital 
Statistics  of  both  cities.  The  rate  of  infantile 
mortality  in  both  cities  is  very  nearly  level 
(it  is  extremely  high),  although  Dublin  is  an 
old  city,  with  narrow  streets  and  a  poor 
system  of  sanitation,  whereas  Belfast  is  a 
modern  city,  with  wide  streets  and  an 
admirable  system  of  sanitation.  The  cost 
of  living,  too,  is  very  high  in  Dublin,  but  it 
is  low  in  Belfast.  Rents  are  so  dear  in 
Dublin  that  the  bulk  of  the  poor  people  live 
in  tenement  buildings,  but  so  cheap  in 
Belfast  that  there  are  hardly  any  tenement 
buildings,  and  very  few  instances  of  more 
than  one  family  in  a  house.  If,  in  spite  of 
these  advantages  in  favour  of  Belfast,  the 
rate  of  child  mortality  is  almost  level  with 
that  of  Dublin,  it  is  clear  that  something  is 
wrong  in  that  city  of  which  the  Ulster 
Unionists  have  not  taken  accoxmt.  My  own 
belief  is  that  the  high  rate  of  infant  mortality 
in  Belfast  is  due  to  the  fact  that  so  many 
married  women  have  to  work  in  the  mills  and 
factories. 


119 


SIR   EDWARD    CARSON 


9 

I  remember  discussing  the  character  of  a 
certain  Belfast  millowner  with  a  friend  of 
mine  who  is  the  manager  of  an  insurance 
company  in  that  city.  I  said  to  him,  "  Why 
don't  you  try  to  get  the  insurance  of  his 
workpeople  under  the  Workmen's  Com- 
pensation Act  ?  It's  a  big  business  !  "  and 
he  replied  that  he  would  not  take  the 
business  if  it  were  offered  to  him.  When  I 
asked  him  to  tell  me  why  he  should  refuse 
it,  he  said,  "  The  girls  are  so  badly  paid  and, 
therefore,  so  badly  nourished,  that  when 
they  meet  with  an  accident  they  take  about 
three  times  as  long  to  recover  from  it  as 
they  would  if  they  were  healthy  !  "  My 
friend  is  a  Protestant. 


10 

The  Young  Irishmen  have  no  desire  to 
boost  one  Irish  city  at  the  expense  of 
another,  or  to  exalt  one  set  of  Irishmen  in 
order  to  make  little  of  another  set.  The 
Young  Irishmen  realise  that  there  are  as 
many  evils  in  Dublin  as  there  are  in  Belfast, 
and  would  admit  that  there  are  probably 
more.  They  see  no  sense  in  these  com- 
parisons of  one  town  to  the  disadvantage  of 

120 


AND    THE    ULSTER   MOVEMENT 

another.  There  is  an  honourable  rivalry 
between  cities  which  the  Young  Irishmen 
are  eager  to  promote.  They  do  not  desire 
to  hear  the  citizens  of  Belfast  asserting  that 
Dublin  is  worse  than  their  city,  and  using 
that  statement  as  an  excuse  for  not  making 
Belfast  better  than  it  is.  If  there  are  to  be 
comparisons  at  all,  the  Yoimg  Irishmen 
would  prefer  that  Belfast  should  compare 
itself  with  some  city  which  is  superior  to  it, 
and  then  seek  to  bring  itself  to  the  level  of 
that  city  and  if  possible  beyond  it.  It  is  an 
odd  thing  about  men  that  they  begin  to  talk 
very  portentously  of  the  reality  of  life  at  a 
time  when  their  chief  energies  are  devoted 
to  the  destruction  of  it.  That  is  how  men 
talk  in  time  of  war.  The  Young  Irishmen 
believe  in  the  reality  of  life  in  all  times, 
whether  of  war  or  of  peace,  and  all  their 
efforts  will  be  made  for  the  conservation  of 
it.  In  setting  out  some  of  the  reforms  that 
they  desire  to  initiate  I  have  omitted  many 
concrete  instances  of  evils  that  must  be 
eradicated  before  Ireland  can  be  said  to  be 
a  healthy  nation ;  and  this  omission  is  due, 
in  part,  to  the  defects  of  my  own  mind,  in 
part,  to  the  fact  that  it  is  difficult  to  make 
a  plan  of  campaign  until  the  forces  are 
marshalled.  It  is  not  easy  to  tell  your 
friend  from  your  foe  in  Ireland  at  this 
moment.  The  Young  Irishmen  believe  that 
they    have    friends    in    every    province    in 

121 


r  ■ 


SIR   EDWARD    CARSON 


Ireland,  but  the  friendships  are  not  yet 
clear,  and  some  who  are  likely  in  the  end  to 
be  comrades  are  now  threatening  each  other 
with  death  and  bitter  enmity.  The  world 
is  full  of  deadly  vapours,  and  the  history  of 
mankind  is  a  long  epic  of  the  attempts  that 
men  make  to  dispel  them.  It  sometimes 
happens  that  poisoned  men  behave  in  a 
way  which  makes  the  task  of  dispelling 
these  vapours  more  difficult,  but  the  Force 
that  animates  the  world  will  not  be  over- 
ruled forever  by  little  angry  men,  inflamed 
by  poisons  which  they  mistake  for  healing 
potions.  There  will  come  great  gales  out  of 
heaven  that  will  blow  the  vapours  from  the 
valleys  and  leave  the  hill-tops  clear  to  every 
eye.  Every  act  of  reconciliation  is  a  gale 
from  God,  and  when  Protestants  and 
Catholics,  Orangemen  and  Ancient  Hiber- 
nians put  their  hands  together,  and  the 
four  beautiful  fields  of  Cathleen  ni  Houlihan 
become  one  pasture,  there  will  be  no 
poisonous  vapour  left  in  Ireland  to  obscure 
the  destiny  of  Irishmen.  "  Can  it  be  that 
love,  sacred,  devoted  love,  is  not  all  power- 
ful ?  "  Turgenev  demands  in  "  Fathers  and 
Children,"  and  answers  his  question  thus  : 
"  Oh,  no !  However  passionate,  sinning 
and  rebellious  the  heart  hidden  in  the  tomb, 
the  flowers  growing  over  it  peep  serenely  at 
us  with  their  innocent  eyes  ;  they  tell  us 
not  of  eternal  peace   alone,   of  that  great 

122 


AND    THE    ULSTER    MOVEMENT 

— 

peace  of  '  indifferent '  nature  ;  they  tell  us 
too  of  eternal  reconciliation  and  of  life 
without  end." 

11 

And  so,  if  there  is  much  that  is  vague  and 
rhetorical  in  this  book ;  if  there  are  many 
omissions  of  practical  things  that  need  to 
be  done  ;  if  I  have  failed  to  tell  you  of  the 
housing  schemes  that  must  be  initiated, 
the  laws  that  must  be  enacted  to  safeguard 
workers  from  the  rapacity  of  employers  and 
of  schemes  to  make  the  work  of  Irishmen 
more  commonly  known  to  other  men ;  if 
I  have  failed  in  these  things  (and  I  do  not 
doubt  that  I  have),  ascribe  these  failures  not 
to  the  futility  of  the  Young  Irishmen,  but 
to  the  defects  of  my  mmd  and  temper.  I 
have  tried,  less  to  show  you  plans  than  to 
show  you  a  spirit,  and  if  I  have  done  that, 
I  have  fulfilled  my  task.  The  futiure  of 
Ireland  is  in  the  hands  of  the  Young  Irish- 
men. The  Old  Men  have  had  their  time, 
and  a  poor,  twisted  thing  they  have  made 
of  the  Ireland  that  they  inherited.  The 
Yoxmg  Irishmen  will  waste  no  tears  on  the 
Old  Irishmen  as  they  shovel  them  into  the 
grave. 


128 


SIR    EDWARD    CARSON 


12 

The  reader  may  feel  that  a  rebuke  is  due 
to  a  writer  who  devotes  one  chapter  to  the 
subject  of  the  title  of  his  book,  and  fills  the 
remaining  chapters  with  other  matters.  So, 
as  a  German  would  say  !  I  wrote  this  book 
for  the  express  purpose  of  telling  my  readers 
that  men  such  as  Mr.  Redmond  and  Sir 
Edward  Carson  are  of  very  little  importance 
in  Ireland.  It  is  not  these  persons  who  are 
moulding  the  shape  of  Irish  affairs,  but 
other  men  whose  names  are  hardly  known. 
A  hundred  years  hence,  some  scribbler  will 
write  an  article  on  Forgotten  Politicians, 
and  he  will  mention  the  names  of  John 
Redmond  and  Edward  Carson  and  such- 
like, and  old  gentlemen,  wheezing  in  club- 
comers,  will  blink  their  eyes  and  try  to 
make  their  memories  coherent.  "  God  bless 
my  soul  I  "  they  will  say,  "  there  were 
persons  of  those  names  I  I  distinctly  re- 
member now  ...  let  me  see,  what  did 
John  Redmond  do  ?  Who  was  Edward 
Carson  ?  "  And  they  will  not  be  able  to 
remember. 


124 


AND    THE    ULSTER   MOVEMENT 


18 

And,  anyhow,  it  is  not  my  fault  that  there 
is  so  little  to  say  about  Sir  Edward  Carson. 
I  would  have  said  more  if  there  had  been 
more  to  say. 


125 


\ 


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